American History:
On “American Exceptionalism”

Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

An underlying theme of this important collection of essays is “the end of American exceptionalism.” The following passages are excerpted from the editors’ introduction to this volume (pp. 4-5, 14):

Until quite recently many Americans thought of their history and their role in the world as not merely different from those of other nations but as “exceptional”—as a beacon or model for other nations, with a special and unique destiny to lead the rest of the world to freedom and democracy. Many historians shared this view. For more than two centuries, much of the interest Americans have had in the pasts of other peoples and other cultures—in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, “Western Civilization”—grew out of their desire to bolster and make sense of their “exceptionalist” destiny in the world. Surely every nation has its own peculiar view of its role in the world, but few have equaled America in promoting the claim of its special destiny. In the second half of the twentieth century only the Soviet Union could advance claims as sweeping as those of the United States about its peculiar historical mission.

In one way or another, this theme—the long held notions nurtured by Americans and American historians about their nation’s allegedly exceptional history—links the papers that follow and gives this volume a measure of its unity. As Dorothy Ross notes in her paper, exceptionalism for Americans has generally meant a New World that was “antithetical to the Old,” an America that was different from Europe, inferior in many ways, but at least free from Europe’s ills and an exemplar or model for the future progress of liberty and democracy. Exceptionalism has been as a resilient long-term constant in American culture, a viewpoint recently endorsed by a number of American historians, including John Higham, Michael Kammen, and Jack P. Greene. Greene, in his book on the Intellectual Construction of America, traced the term exceptionalism back to Tocqueville’s statement about Americans being “quite exceptional.” After surveying American thinking over the past three centuries, Greene concluded that the concept of exceptionalism was “present at the very creation of America.” By the time of the Revolution this belief in its exceptionalism and its special place in the world had become an integral part of America’s identity. Always underlying this belief, of course, was a sense of difference from Europe. Generation upon generation of intellectuals and members of the general public shared this conviction.

During the colonial era that sense of difference was usually one of inferiority. Most colonists realized only too keenly that they were simply British provincials living on the very edges of Christendom. They were awed and mortified by the contrast between their own seemingly trivial world and that of the great British metropolis three thousand miles away. The Revolution changed much of this sense of inferiority. At a stroke, what had been seen as deficiencies for the colonists—their lack of a court, an hereditary aristocracy, and an established church—were transformed into advantages for the new republican government. Americans now saw their country possessing a freer, more prosperous, more egalitarian society than any in Europe; America had become for them a beacon and an asylum for the oppressed of the Old World. Americans in 1776 may have felt culturally inferior to Britain and to Europe; but they were a rising people, and they believed that sooner or later they would become the greatest nation in the world.

This belief by Americans that, in the words of President James K. Polk, their history lay ahead of them colored much of their national history writing in the nineteenth century and gave it much of its teleological and exceptionalist character— its sense that the United States was the fulfillment of all that was great and progressive in the past. In his chapter Gordon Wood shows that if a history of the colonial period did not point to the future greatness of the United States, then few people were interested in it. It has been the same with the Civil War, which, as George Fredrickson says, “has inspired more scholarship than any other nineteenth-century subject” precisely because it defined the nation as no other nineteenth-century event did. Indeed, the subject of the Civil War is especially attractive in the present, writes Fredrickson, in that “it provides a persuasive argument for the uniqueness of American history that is not based on some claim to special virtue.”

This broadening of perspective is changing the definition of the nation’s history. Historians of colonial America no longer focus exclusively on the thirteen continental British colonies that became the United States; they now have to take account of the entire Atlantic world involving Western Europe, West Africa, South America and the Caribbean, and the rest of North America. We are now beginning the history of American immigration from where the people came, in Europe or Africa or Asia, instead of starting the story at the docks of North America, a point of view that, as the Canadian historian J. M. Bumstead points out, “stressed, explicitly or implicitly, the unique and exceptional nature of immigration to North America.” Consequently, we now know that European and Asian emigrants went to many more places than the United States. In this new cosmopolitan atmosphere comparative studies are flourishing as never before. The history of slavery is now being viewed within the largest possible perspectives, comparing North American slavery not with just that in Latin America but, as Peter Kolchin has done, with Russian servitude as well. George Fredrickson has compared race relations in the United States and South Africa. Common circumstances and common experiences in the modern world suggest more and more comparisons between the histories of United States and other nations, involving everything from the demilitarization of economies after the world wars to the movement of people from the countryside to the cities and the development of mass politics. All this seems to suggest that the United States is not an exceptional place with an exceptional role in history after all.

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1989 should have left the way open for the triumphant assertion of American uniqueness and particularity. Ironically, at the very moment when their nation emerged as the world’s dominant economic and military power, American historians have appeared reluctant to make such claims. American exceptionalism is losing much of its earlier resonance, and thus Europe no longer has the same meaning for Americans as it once did. The American nation does not seem to be the same either. For good or ill, the increasingly multicultural diversity of the United States is diluting and blurring an old-fashioned unified sense of American identity. Some American intellectuals are promoting a new intellectual globalism that seeks to transcend all national loyalties and even the idea of national citizenship. Some like the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argue for a civic education that cultivates a citizenship of all humanity, not of a particular nation. Since national identity is “a morally irrelevant characteristic,” students should be taught that their “primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.” With such sentiments in the air it is not surprising that some historians have difficulty holding on to traditional conceptions of the American nation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

	Preface
	Introduction	3
Ch. 1	Exceptionalism	21
Ch. 2	Gender	41
Ch. 3	Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution	59
Ch. 4	The New and Newer Histories: Social Theory and Historiography in an American Key	85
Ch. 5	Explaining Racism in American History	107
Ch. 6	Crevecoeur's Question: Historical Writing on Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity	120
Ch. 7	The Relevance and Irrelevance of American Colonial History	144
Ch. 8	Nineteenth-Century American History	164
Ch. 9	Americans and the Writing of Twentieth-Century United States History	185
Ch. 10	Western Civilization	206
Ch. 11	American Classical Historiography	222
Ch. 12	In the Mirror's Eye The Writing of Medieval History in America	238
Ch. 13	The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA	263
Ch. 14	Between Whig Traditions and New Histories: American Historical Writing about Reformation and Early Modern Europe	295
Ch. 15	Prescott's Paradigm American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain	324
Ch. 16	The American Historiography of the French Revolution	349
Ch. 17	Modern Europe in American Historical Writing	393
Ch. 18	Clio in Tauris American Historiography on Russia	415
Ch. 19	House of Mirrors American History-Writing on Japan	434
	List of Contributors	455
	Index	459

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