Identifying Families in C-SPAN's U.S. Presidential Ratings: 2000, 2009, and 2017

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

The Wretched Refuse of Jewish American Literary History

This paper attempts to make a corpus and cross-linguistic study of how the Pacific War is evaluated in US and Japanese history textbooks by drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Appraisal System. The global pattern of evaluation in the data is such that the US history textbook gives more value to acts and things, creates an authoritative voice excluding alternative positions, and has a delicate construal for the extent of evaluation. By contrast, the Japanese history textbook displays a subjective affective stance and a flagged authorial voice strengthened by alternative positions. A detailed discourse analysis of the lexicogrammar in the Pacific War narratives of the US and Japanese history textbooks further shows different evaluation orientations for the construal of images of the United States and Japan. The US history textbook characterizes the United States as a state of military power and high morality for its military operations in the Pacific War while censuring Japan’s cruelty of attack, whereas the Japanese history textbook highlights Japan’s tenacity and voluntary acts on the battlefield while condemning the United States for its immorality of bombing.

United States Studies in Latin American History, Since their Emergence as a distinct body of literature in the early years of the twentieth century, have been much more tradition-bound than their counterparts in United States and European history. More descriptive than analytical, they concentrated on diplomatic, military, political, and institutional history. They were legalistic and elitist in their approach, a reflection in part of their subject matter. But many other factors accounted for their traditionalism. Narration and description seemed justifiable first steps in a field practically devoid of serious scholarly attention. The dearth of research aids and the accessibility of certain types of source materials influenced the nature of the work undertaken. Less tangible factors were also present. It was easy to justify studies about former Spanish territories later incorporated into the United States since, after all, such studies were really a part of “American” history, and a “romantic” part at that. A case could also be made for the study of Spain and her empire in the New World. Once Europe's greatest military power and master of a world-wide empire, Catholic, aristocratic Spain subsequently became the rival of England, source of the dominant liberal, Protestant culture of the United States. Moreover, as the United States itself began to acquire overseas colonies, was it not important to assess more objectively the Spanish experience with empire? But what was the importance of studying the dismal and chaotic post-independence history of Spain's former colonies in America? Perhaps concerned about the reception of their work in an area many people considered marginal, United States historians of Latin America produced impeccable scholarship on themes of proven acceptability. Working largely in isolation from United States social scientists, unlike their colleagues in United States history, they remained remote from the fascinating tools and concepts being developed in other disciplines. Moreover, although many first-rate scholars contributed works of solid worth and enduring value, the field as a whole seems to have failed to attract the most imaginative and original minds.

Need a solid historiographical essay on the social history of British America? On African American or American religious history? On the foreign relations of the United States? Or on ten other specialized topics in American history? Read French? Then Chantiers d'histoire americane is just the volume for you. While the essays in the volume edited by Jean Heffer and Franpois Weil vary in quality, they are completely up-to-date in their scholarship, asking the same questions and citing the same books and articles as similar essays published in the United States. Should we celebrate this mastery of the idiom of American scholarship by these French scholars, nearly all of whom hold academic positions in French universities? Or should we lament the increasing homogeneity of scholarly discourse? In making themselves experts in American history, the authors have inbibed the terms of reference and the intellectual assumptions of their American colleagues. The major difference is their relative detachment from the passions of American historiographic debates, which enables them to assess the strengths and the weaknesses of the contending arguments. Thus, Laurent Cesari offers a fine critique of various approaches to United States diplomatic history (Progressive idealism, balance-ofpower realism, Wisconsin revisionism, and recent postrevisionist and corporatist interpretations) without endorsing any perspective. Like other authors in this volume (for example, those who deal with controversial questions in labor history or in the social history of early America), Cesari assumes an Olympian stance, disparaging monocausal interpretations and celebrating the wisdom of additional research and complex eclectic explanations. Only rarely in this collection do we hear a voice with a distinct and insistent French methodological edge or point of view, as in Pierre Gervais's critical assessment of the empiricist epistemology of much of American social history. What holds for the scholarly essay applies as well to the French survey text on American history. The two volumes written by Pierre Melandri (one in collaboration with Jacques Portes) tell the story of American history much in the manner of an American author writing for an American audience. That is, the French texts assume that the student has a basic familiarity with the historical figures, characters, institutions, and events that dot the narrative. They do not pause to comment in detail on distinctive features of government in the United States, such as the division of power between the state and federal governments; nor, with a few exceptions, do they invoke French examples or analogies. Thus, the discussion by Melandri and Portes of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment and the subsequent imposition of a modest graduated income tax (to cover the loss of tariff revenues stemming from the Underwood Act) makes no reference to parallel developments in Europe,

Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

This chapter discusses the two relevant types of air power–the air lift and the other air operations–and assesses their relative contributions to the operation. Operation Just Cause has prompted many questions concerning the future use of air power. Panama was considered a secure area for air operations. There was no air threat and the ground threat was limited in its scope and intensity. The invasion of Panama employed the largest number of special operations aircraft in United States (US) history. The invasion of Panama employed the largest number of special operations aircraft in US history. Panama was simply a matter of massing aircraft in a nation that already had an existing US command structure, an existing US air base, and 13,000 US troops stationed within a one-leg flight of our border. Discounting those US troops who were already located in Panama and the 6,000 who were landed by aircraft, air-dropping 4,000 paratroopers at the right time and place was significant.

Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States.2 Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.3 And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.4 It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.5The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.In the first part of this essay, we outline five comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts and make the case for the First World Balance.In one sense, prisons and police are complements. It would be impossible to have many people in prison without the police, since, to put people in prison, the police usually have to apprehend and arrest them first. It would also be difficult to have police without prisons, since the threat of imprisonment is one of the typical sanctions wielded by police around the world. Given this, and given the exceptionally high incarceration rate in the United States, many people assume that the United States must also have an exceptionally high number of police officers.But that is not in fact the case. Figure 1 plots the police and incarceration rates of a sample of developed countries.6 The graph illustrates the chief fact that has animated the iterature on mass incarceration: America is a developed-world outlier in its use of incarceration. Yet it also illustrates the much less-well-known fact that America is not at all an outlier in its rate of policing. The United States has around 212 police officers for every 100,000 total residents, which ranks it in the forty-first percentile of today’s developed world.Yet this way of putting things in fact understates the magnitude of what has been misunderstood. Figure 1 denominates the scope of incarceration and policing by population. By that metric, the United States has an exceptionally high incarceration rate but a relatively normal number of police officers given the total size of its population. But we think it is more informative to denominate punishment and policing by the level of serious crime in a country. By doing so, it is possible to make inferences about cross-national differences in how countries manage serious crime.Here one runs into some difficulties. For several reasons, it is challenging to compare levels of serious crime across countries. Some countries criminalize acts that are perfectly legal in others. Countries define many criminal acts, such as “assault,” differently from one another.7 And countries vary widely in their ability to measure the incidence of criminal acts. The result is that many international patterns in reported data are obviously misleading. Data collected by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, for instance, suggest that the rate of violent crime is higher in Belgium, France, and Canada than in El Salvador, Russia, or Rwanda.8 Our solution to this problem is to measure the rate of serious crime by the rate of homicides.For the comparisons that anchor this piece—the United States to the developed world—this immediately raises a problem. Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have argued that “[r]ates of crime are not greatly different in the United States from those in other developed nations. … [O]ur extremely high rates of lethal violence are a … a distinct social problem.”9 If America has more lethal violence than Europe, but not more crime, the relatively high homicide rate in the United States would be a biased estimate of the rate of serious crime.We have two kinds of reasons for thinking that this is wrong and that the homicide rate is the right (or best) measure. First, given the reliability issues that bedevil the police or victim survey data on which Zimring and Hawkins and others rely, this is an area in which one has to take some cues from theory and other data. Consider, then, the following trilemma.Concentrated disadvantage is the root cause of most serious crime in developed societies.America has significantly more concentrated disadvantage than European countries.America has the same amount of serious crime as other developed countries.One of these three statements must be false. Criminological theory and existing social science evidence strongly support (1).10 And we think there is good evidence to support (2).11 The main theoretical reason to believe (3) is that the United States has far more guns per capita than European countries. But while firearm availability no doubt has some impact on the level of violence, we think the effect is likely to be small. A large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns across place, persons, and time. Consider, for example, that while the United States has ten times as many guns as El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly ten times higher than it is here.12 And that white, richer households in the United States are much more likely to report owning a gun than Black, poorer households.13 Given this and given the reasons to believe (1) and (2), we think (3) is most likely to be the false leg of this trilemma.The second reason—which does not depend on the first—is that homicide accounts for a large proportion of the total harm caused by crime. Insofar as standard measures of the crime rate give equal weight to each act criminalized by the state, they are conceptually meaningless. A society with a thousand petty larcenies and one murder has much less serious crime than a society with a thousand murders and one petty larceny, yet the raw crime rate would be the same in both. A meaningful measure thus has to account for the relative seriousness, or harmfulness, of each action.It is difficult to measure how harmful different kinds of crime are with any precision, but the cost-of-crime literature furnishes a first approximation. Economists estimate the social costs of different kinds of crime by asking people how much they would be willing to pay to reduce their odds of being a victim of various offenses. Summarizing this literature, Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCary estimated that the cost of a murder is around $7,000,000, the cost of an assault less than $40,000, the cost of a robbery around $13,000, and the cost of motor vehicle theft around $6,000.14 Thus, even though homicide is much less frequent than other crimes, it is judged so much more severe that it accounts for about seventy percent of the total costs of crime. This means that it is a much better estimate of the rate of serious harm than unweighted measures of the rate of crime. Figure 2 shows the same data, but this time denominated by homicide rather than by population.One immediately sees something different. Now, America’s outlying level of incarceration looks relatively ordinary. Its prisoner/homicide ratio is a little higher than the developed-world median, but not by much. No less stark is the fact that its police/homicide ratio now appears exceedingly low. That is, if denominated by the level of serious crime, America is not normally policed but rather under-policed. America has about one-ninth the number of police officers, per homicide, than does the median developed country.15One of the refrains of police reformers has been that American police are uniquely inefficient. Typically, when people argue that American people—and Black people, especially—have been under-protected and over-policed, they mean by this that the priorities of American police are skewed. Police focus too much on petty offenses and too little on serious crimes. This is the purpose of dwelling, for example, on the fact that only four percent of a typical police department’s time is devoted to handling violent crime.16And indeed, it is true that in comparative context the police in the United States do not solve many serious crimes. America’s clearance rate is the lowest of all comparable countries, as Figure 3 shows.17 The median developed country records around one homicide-related arrest per homicide that occurs. In the United States, the figure is 0.56.Yet this does not seem to be, as reformers imagine, because police in the United States are exceptionally focused on nonserious offenses. Consider one measure of police focus: the number of homicide arrests made per police officer. The clearance rate (homicide arrests/homicide) is the product of police focus (homicide arrests/police) and the police footprint (police/homicide). The conventional view of policing in the United States suggests that the problem with America’s clearance rate is that footprint is high, but focus is low. In fact, as Figure 3 suggests, the converse is true: footprint is low, but focus is high.One way of summarizing much of what we have shown so far is to observe that the United States seems to emphasize the severity of punishment over the certainty of sanction. The exceedingly high prison/police ratio and the low level of police per homicide together suggest that the United States relies on long sentences rather than the sanction of arrest to control crime. One way to estimate certainty and severity more directly is to decompose the prisoner/homicide ratio into the ratio of arrests to homicide (estimating certainty) and the ratio of prisoners to arrests (estimating severity). Figure 4 plots these two ratios across the developed world. The result supports our judgment: the United States has relatively low levels of certainty but relatively high levels of severity.One advantage of using homicides, arrests, and prisoners to measure these two concepts is that we can say something about how certainty and severity are distributed within the United States. As Figure 4 also shows, while all Americans suffer from an exceptional balance of certainty and severity, it is Black people in the United States who are especially subject to it.American police killed around 1,800 people in 2019. In the rest of the developed world, the average number of police killings is around 5 per year; the median is just 2. It seems intuitive that to reduce the level of police violence, we must reduce the footprint of the police. Yet cross-country comparisons suggest the opposite conclusion. As Figure 5 shows, there is a striking and negative cross-national correlation between the rate at which police kill civilians and the number of police officers per homicide.Countries with large numbers of police per homicide are countries in which police are much less likely to kill civilians, as compared to countries with fewer police per homicide. The countries of the developed world cluster on the bottom right of this graph (high police/homicide, low levels of police violence), while the countries of the developing world cluster toward the top left. The exception is the United States.To be clear, a negative correlation is not proof that lower levels of police/homicide cause the police to be more violent. Several possible confounders might explain the coincidence of high levels of police killing and homicide (e.g., inequality). It is even conceivable that the relationship could run in the reverse direction (high levels of police killing cause low public demand for policing). Because police killing is rare and our data are poor, causal inference is challenging.But there are some theoretical reasons to believe that this correlation is in fact causal. When violence overwhelms police resources, police make contact with only a small fraction of those who commit it. Under these circumstances, the civil treatment of a small fraction of offenders will have a negligible deterrent effect. Indeed, the American combination of small police footprint and brutality is reminiscent of the early modern state. As the opening pages of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish describe, when the infrastructural capacity of the state is low, exemplary but rare shows of spectacular force can be the most effective way to induce compliance with the law.18In addition, in societies where police resources struggle to keep pace with rates of interpersonal violence and private citizens are therefore more likely to arm themselves, police officers are more likely to behave brutally out of regard for their own interests. A severe sentencing regime such as ours could well exacerbate this dynamic since, under such a regime, there are stronger incentives for suspects to take extreme measures to evade apprehension and arrest. Thus, relying on severe and lengthy sentencing, rather than policing, to deter crime could make the job of policing more dangerous. And this might in turn make interactions with the police even more dangerous—for civilians.Of course, these inferences are speculative. Further empirical research is needed to test them. But we think the negative cross-national correlation between police killings and the number of police officers per homicide, along with the theoretical reasons to believe those correlations might be causal, should serve as a warning sign. It is not at all clear that reducing the number of police officers on the street would reduce the pervasiveness of police violence and abuse. And it suggests to us, again, that the obstacles to police reform run deep. Reformers often argue that police officers should be trained as “guardians” rather than “warriors.”19 But the training protocols that instill and entrench the warrior mindset may just be symptoms of under-policing.The United States is ridden with much more serious crime than other comparably wealthy societies. It responds to this exceptionally high level of serious crime with an exceptional combination of relatively small police forces and comparatively long sentences. And, tellingly, this regime reaches its apogee in the way it treats most disadvantaged people. What is to be done?The comparative observations we have made above suggest an obvious hypothesis. Perhaps the United States, like the rest of the developed world, ought to emphasize policing and penal certainty rather than incarceration and penal severity.20 Perhaps the United States ought to shift resources from incarceration to policing until the balance between the two looks more like the balance in the rest of the developed world. The implications of such a move—which we call the First World Balance—would be dramatic. The United States today has almost three times as many prisoners as police officers. If it raised no revenue but simply used the money saved by cutting prison populations to hire police officers until the ratio was the same as the ratio in the developed world (about 3.4 times as many police officers as prisoners), the new United States would have about 370,000 prisoners and 1.1 million police officers. That is, the First World Balance, if implemented in the United States, would be a society with about 1.9 million fewer prisoners and almost half a million more police officers.21 As we note later, this new United States would not be a dystopian police state. Moving to the First World Balance would in fact align the rate of policing in the United States with the rest of the developed world.But, of course, to note that moving to the First World Balance would align the United States with other countries is not to have shown that this would be a good thing. One cannot reason to normative policy conclusions from comparative empirical observations alone. To make these arguments, one has to connect fact to value. Would the First World Balance be justified?To understand our answer, it will be helpful to note three points about our approach.First, it was due to our shared interest in answering questions like this one that the two of us began to work together. Sociologists write about normatively laden questions but are taught to refrain from considering the normative implications of their arguments. It is no surprise that many of them do anyway, since it is those implications that give their vocation meaning. But social scientists’ lack of training in moral and political philosophy means that these conclusions are too often founded on ideology or intuition rather than rigorous normative argument. Some philosophers are interested in applying moral and political theory to puzzles that bear on real-world problems. But a lack of social training many of them to answers to these questions (or of those that do not empirical Thus, our is to empirical evidence and social theory with explicit normative where we to be as as In we do not to the theory of interpersonal or political (or the theory of out the implications of just that we the implications of a of In we that do not have implications for which suggests that our hands about these issues may not be the it We think that the combination of empirical and normative one would have to to our are various of that our case for the First World Balance should be as our to a about how the United States ought to a of penal readers will we the in our by the this a of And force a between prisons and police, when various kinds of social or are to We say more about we the in this way in our forthcoming book What’s Wrong with Mass but some is in think that in the long a of social policy would reduce crime by its root and in turn reduce the and demand for policing and In other we argue that any of or efficiency that the United States should social But a of social policy from to of this magnitude would the to some kind of over the Given the of the American movement and the of the American we doubt we will like this Our in this essay is to say something about what should be in the world in which we just in the world in which we would like to To say something about that we to that are only prisons and the the existing of money from prisons and police to social just as many reformers have As we argue in What’s Wrong with Mass this is because social policy is by what we call the To the root of crime would be to the for the most disadvantaged people in To do this by social would resources, since the of are not America’s most disadvantaged people. Because penal is in a way that social is it costs about a to run the developed most penal state but something like to run its most there is good evidence that social that are at the early and be at reducing But the same that these social also it for to them at The more the the more we can be that these will the of the and the social policy is but for crime while social policy can be but is it is not to the root of crime with to public Yet some might argue that we should from policing and incarceration even if this would result in more policing and concentrated imprisonment and on disadvantaged rather than on incarceration in disadvantaged can social in and political and policing, can entrench and And arrest records can be a disadvantage in the and the fact that many of those who are have their are all by the the with the many negative of incarceration and policing to sanction a in crime is serious crime has those same crime can social and exacerbate and concentrated disadvantage at the in a violent incentives to do things that are for social and violence can be and lack of and and are of in where crime is without to and reducing for public and other of often which the and of disadvantage in those And just as a criminal or an arrest can be a on the job of crime can be in extremely disadvantaged where can become a that serious crime the same kinds of as policing and concentrated we argue that state and an and between the of crime, and policing. The have to bear the of these no how state and to make them. The fact that of this are is an It is an of our But we think some of these are more just and more than we think that the us is how to strike the right penal What ought to be about the level of incarceration and the level of policing in today’s United in the 2 2 above in Figure should the United States how a might this that the state should how to strike the balance between incarceration and policing by that in this 2 2 that should we different of striking the balance between policing and incarceration to in the what we take to be the of moving to any in this what it would for the level of homicide and crime, the number of people in prison, and the number of people killed and by the police. What would to each of these if the United States to the First World homicide and other kinds of serious crime would The empirical literature on is that the size of police forces is a much more way to crime than the of prison sentences for those who are and The for this is well in and do not make the way than the of the they are people to the of their much more than in the It is by possible to to the of a prison only on the in the it is to be that the of arrest and would do more to deter crime than in the United States, a on policing is almost times more effective at crime than a on Our is that the First World Balance would be a world of a little more than four thousand fewer (and less crime more the costs to by mass incarceration would be its prison is extremely to the of It is difficult to put a number on this But one that a in prison is even as good as a this a of two million in the prison would be the of one million of thousand a of about The the rate (e.g., if for a in prison only of the of for a prison, rather than the the of the costs of policing. the one a world of more policing be a world of more on work by our is that the First World Balance would be a world of almost million more the other for the reasons we we that a world of more policing would be one of less police violence (about fewer people killed by the have to some way to these against each This is not but one to do the seems against the For the arrests to be reason to against our on the costs of these arrests to must the of the of less crime and less

The history of the United States’ involvement in international reveals a disproportionate timeline between signing and ratification. Notably, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), one of the binding twin covenants enacting the goals of the non-binding Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), features a 15-year delay following signing before ratification by the U.S. The agreement was viewed as inherently Western, and the United States took leadership during negotiations, becoming the primary promoter of the drafting process. Yet, domestic support for the agreement was seemingly inconsistent with its leading role, identifiable by the delay. The following analysis will evaluate the rationales—legal, institutional, and political—for the delay in the United States’ ratification of the ICCPR. It will then explore catalysts in the international sphere that incited the eventual ratification. Through close readings of Senate hearings, drafts of UN negotiation documents, and analysis of theoretical frameworks by which the United States’ system ratifies international agreements, the following synthesis is a variety of primary and secondary sources which explain the delay in ratification. The study reveals that the United States’ reputation of non-ratification has implications for its international credibility, affecting its ability to shape global politics. The ICCPR is used as a case that elucidates the United States’ rationale for ratifying, or neglecting to ratify, other international agreements; thus, this analysis will address the influence of international politics on domestic participation.

As we know that the Vietnam War was the greatest war in the history of the United States, because of the war that lasted for 20 years have been eating so many casualties and cause material loss and spiritual huge especially for the United States. The Vietnam War is a terrible war going on throughout history, due to the emergence of a conflict between two ideologies were very influential in the world of liberal democracy to communist Vietnam, resulting in the outbreak of the country into two parts, namely the North Vietnam (communist) and South Vietnam (liberal democracy). Surely split two countries aided by allies such as France, the United States and China, so the cause of tension is prolonged that war spread to Laos and Cambodia. During the war the United States is trying to help South Vietnam in order to avoid the spread of communism in the state, because it is very dangerous for the existence of the United States as the adherents of liberal democracy Keywords : Vietnam War, Communism, Liberalism, United States, existance

THE LANDS WERE NOT EMPTY

A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism

The long awaited publication of volumes II and III of the Cambridge Economic History of the United States (hereafter CEHUS) is a landmark in the historiography of the U.S. economy (volume I, on the colonial economy, appeared in 1996). A decade in the making, and appearing after the untimely death of one of its editors, Robert Gallman, these volumes will without doubt be accessed and accessed frequently as reference works in the twenty-first century. Not since 1972, when, under the editorial leadership of Lance Davis, Richard Easterlin, and William Parker, Harper and Row published American Economic Growth: An Economist's History of the United States has a comparable multi-author work been attempted. In the event, ten of the original 12 contributors to that work are here for a return engagement.

12Historically Speaking April 2002 Daniel Walker Howe Whither Nineteenth-Century American History? How should 2 lst-century America view 19th-centuryAmerica? Every generation, we have come to expect, reinterprets its past in the light ofits own experience. During the past forty years we have witnessed dramatic changes in our discipline. Most notable has been the rise of the New Social History with all its ramifications , which include such varied and important developments as the use of gender as a categoryofanalysis, the redefinition ofWestern historyas die studyofa region rather dian a process, and a diorough transformation in the prevailing view of Reconstruction after the Civil War. In the excitement of die new, odier modes ofhistorical inquiry—political, diplomatic, economic, müitaryhistory—have been neglected or turned over to other disciplines . In presentingmyviews onwhere the study of19di-centuryAmerica might go next, I am talking primarily about what I believe historians should do, not trying to predict what diey will do. Actually, I feel reasonably sanguine about the prospects for 19th-century American historyin the comingyears, and die chances that my hopes for the discipline will be realized seem good. Unlike the early enthusiasts of the New Social History, I do not repudiate die previous generation's efforts or seek to jettison them. We can build upon dieir achievement and diat ofearlier generations . IfI could encapsulate myprescriptions for improving history into a single phrase, it would be: avoid arbitrarydivisions. One such unfortunate dichotomy is built into die very definition ofAmerican history, and thatis die splitbetween United States and all odierhistory . Fromjuniorhigh school on, students are taughthistoryin two separate compartments: American history and other (mainly European ) history. Mostcollege and universityhistory departments are bifurcated along diese linesin dieirpractical, everydayorganization. At die lower division level, die Americanists teach introductory courses in American history , while the odier colleagues teachWestern Civilization or World Civilization. U.S. history is seldom integrated into Western Civilization or World Civilization. Many practicing historians ofthe United States have relatively little training in other kinds ofhistory, and we tend to specialize more narrowlyman historians in other fields do. Too few of us try to keep up with work done in other areas ofhistory. Yetexperience has shown thatvery often the best work in American history has Thefinalartificial division I wish to see overcome is that between academic history andpopular history . been inspired by work done on odier countries , such as die guidance die FrenchAnnales School provided to die New Social History. American historians working in the United States compound dieirprovincial isolation by paying too little attention to die work done byhistorians ofthe United States outside die United States. For example, the wide-ranging and profound scholarship ofthe British historian William R. Brock on American history is scarcely known in the United States. Recent initiatives by the Organization of American Historians have undertaken to bridge diis divide, and I am pleased to see diat historians workingon the United States outside ofdie United States no longer feel quite so marginalized by dieir colleagues here. The organization ofthe historical profession around national identities is and should be headed for serious modification. For American historians, this means increasing attention to supranational contexts. Perhaps the most important of these at present is the Adantic World. David Brion Davis and Bernard Bailyn have taken a leading part in defining this field, but many odier historians have enriched die study ofeconomic, social, cultural, and diplomatic contacts and conflicts among the countries and continents bordering die Adantic. The Adantic slave trade, die Scottish-American Enlightenment, and die Anglo-American community ofhumanitarian reform are but three of the best known historical topics illuminated by the study of American history in an Atlantic context. Aldiough die studyofdie AdanticWorld has been carried outmore bycolonialists than by historians ofthe 19di century, in factwe have as much to learn from itas any. The 19th century was not the time ofAmerican isolation that it sometimes seems. Most economic and cultural developments ofdieVictorian age— whedierone is discussingdie industrial revolution , die relations between science and religion , the rise ofthe novel, or the women's suffrage movement—were transadantic in nature and cannot be understood in solely American terms. As globalization and migration continue to integrate the economies and cultures ofdie world...

From Community and Place to Network and Space:The Transnational Dimension of Immigration in American Jewish History Cornelia Wilhelm (bio) The concept of “transnational history” emerged in the 1990s as a response to the call to “internationalize” American history.1 It is no accident that this new methodological approach among American historians had an extraordinary impact on Jewish history, a field of research that was at the same time particularly influenced by a re-emerging transnational consciousness in a newly united post-Cold War Europe. Transnational approaches have challenged previous understandings of “Americanization” and “assimilation” as linear, straightforward and one-directional processes. Today immigrant identities are generally understood by scholars to result from “complex and multidirectional processes of transformation and cultural hybridization.”2 Transnational history examines how such complex identities are influenced by such factors as the political or legal status of immigrants, including statelessness, [End Page 545] naturalization, multiple citizenships, and loyalties as new citizens. Transnational history is therefore a promising analytic category for understanding American Jewish history, which is intensely connected with histories of Jewish and non-Jewish communities abroad. A transnational perspective also allows us to judge if and to what degree American Jewry is unique, special or connected with other Jewries. In the form of comparative history it further helps us explore the commonalities and differences of diverse Jewries.3 In the following, I want to highlight where a transnational perspective has generated new insights on movement, political activism, and cultural exchanges between Central Europe and the United States. My first project explored the Nazi penetration of the German speaking community in the United States. Although this work did not primarily focus on Jewish history, Jews, antisemitism, and the systematic exclusion of Jews from the German-American community were an essential part of my interest.4 Nazi activities had a noticeable impact on American domestic and foreign policy and on American ethnic relations and cannot be understood solely as an American phenomenon.5 Only a transnational approach reveals the agency of a network of state and non-state actors in the mobilization of ethnic Germans in the United States by Nazism. Such an approach shows that their political mobilization developed gradually and went hand in hand with the establishment of total political control in Germany. A transnational perspective helps us understand how Nazi ideology affected the German-speaking ethnic group in the United States. The adoption of Nazi definitions of Germanness by parts of the organized German-American community, especially by those who depended on the contact with “the official Germany,” led to the formal exclusion of German Jews from the German-American associational life in the United States after 1933.6 A transnational view thus shows generally how racist definitions of national or ethnic identity may reach beyond state borders as “long distance nationalism.” It informs us of the transnational context of anti-Semitism and racism, an understanding that has added a lot to [End Page 546] Holocaust Studies recently.7 More importantly, the application of Nazi racism to the German speaking communities in America was not accidental, but rather the result of a decades-old anti-modernist German understanding of the links between modernity, America, and the Jews.8 To anti-modernists and anti-Semites, no other nation more symbolized the ideas of the French and American Revolutions, two events that had also set off the process of Jewish emancipation. For anti-Semites, America was symbolic for empowering the Jew and allowing him to be a driving force and supposed sole “winner” in the modernization of society, economy, and politics.9 How much American Jews as well as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany were affected by such policies, or how they have reacted to them, has largely been ignored and offers an interesting example of how long-distance nationalism polarized German speakers in the United States, particularly in the New York City area, where German-Americans, American Jews, refugees, and the Nazi movement intensively interacted with each other. Finally it is important to note that the Nazis’ impact on German-America severed a cultural link, which had been an essential part of the relationship between non-Jewish Germans and German Jews in the United...