Confessions of a British Americanist

Abstract

Ironically, Marcus Cunliffe recalled, Americans flattered us, with allusions to Tocqueville and Bryce, by declaring that 'foreigners understand us best.' I was often told as an Englishman that I must be endowed with additional insight/detachment/perspective. Few British historians of America had more of that insight and perspective than Cunliffe, yet he was embarrassed by flattery. He felt assertion ought to be true, but he doubted it. Were we, he continued, to hit upon hypotheses that had eluded intense surveillance of American academe? When best of American scholarship in our field was so ingenious, so aided, so masterful, one might conclude game was in bag not for Oxford and Sorbonne but for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Hopkins, Amherst, Minnesota, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Stanford, and so on and so on.' If a scholar of Cunliffe's range and erudition felt that unease and lack of confidence, generation of historians that followed him was likely to be equally uncertain about advantages of outsiders' perspective. Writing in 1985, Michael Heale identified a generation of British historians of America who secured academic posts in great period of expansion of 1965-75. He argued that the academic interests of many of this generation were shaped by their participation in American academic life, and their books and articles have often been directed primarily at an American audience. In some cases it would be impossible to determine their nationality from their writing-they tend to see themselves as professional historians of U.S. whose jobs just happen to be in Britain. They worked on themes in United States domestic history and aimed to be published by university presses in United States.2 As someone who obtained his first academic appointment in 1971, I can readily identify with orientation toward American audiences Heale described. I found it initially puzzling to be asked by David Thelen to explain how British ideological preconceptions, audiences, and scholarly traditions of discourse shape way I