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| A Nation Among Nations - America's Place in World History |
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By: Bender, Thomas
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Hardback
ISBN: 0809095270
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Weight: 0
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FROM its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United States was and what it stood for. One was “a city on a hill”, a model commonwealth for the rest of humankind. Another, in Walt Whitman's phrase, was a “teeming nation of nations”: near-empty continent of immigration and fresh starts. A third, given currency by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, was of a new and exceptional kind of society not bound by prevailing rules of history.
Each picture stresses what makes America different from other countries. Thomas Bender, a professor of history and humanities at New York University, wants us to focus instead on what makes the United States the same. More exactly, he is urging us to re-think key episodes in America's past by relating them to what was happening elsewhere in the world. The United States, he suggests, is less of a nation apart than super-patriots or America-haters might want to believe. His aim is not to belittle the American achievement but to break the habit of treating it as a virtually isolated feat of self-creation. National histories, he argues, are always local responses to broader trends, and to that rule the United States is no exception.
Five episodes form the core of this challenging essay. “The Ocean World” contrasts the conventional account of American beginnings, which stresses political ideals, religious freedom and economic opportunity, with a wider view that brings in sea-borne trade and slavery. Next, Mr Bender treats the American revolution as a by-product of the “great war” that France and Britain fought off and on throughout the 18th century until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The American civil war (1861-65) becomes part of the democratic era of nation building that began with the European revolutions of 1848.
The United States did not join Europe's scramble for empire at the end of the 19th century as a colonising power. But it fought a terrible war to control the Philippines, set a pattern of intervention in its own hemisphere and in Asia, and established a doctrine of untrammelled sea power that survives to this day. For his fifth episode, Mr Bender likens the progressive social reforms of the 1890s onwards to changes Europeans also made to temper the free market.
The breadth of view is exhilarating, and the reading daunting in scope. Mr Bender dots his essay with awkward reminders that the American past was not a smooth, inevitable rise to superpowerdom and moral beaconhood. Yet “A Nation Among Nations” suffers from an ambiguity of aim. At several points Mr Bender talks of a global story in which the United States has a local part. What is that story? He does not say. This is not his fault. Only the rashest of historians would nowadays dream of telling us, Hegel-wise, where the spirit of world history had come from and where it was headed.
Nor is gesturing towards “global trends” much help: ocean trade, nationalism and democracy, for example, are such broad categories they explain little of the local variation that puzzles us, especially when the locale is the United States, with its oddities—a high birth rate and strong religions, for example—that modern states are supposed not to have.
For the rest, Mr Bender is more modest, and more successful. American failures and successes are usually so large it is easy to forget that they are seldom unique or insulated from events elsewhere. The simple-sounding truth that the United States never was, and never could be, isolated from the world is worth repeating, and Mr Bender repeats it well.
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