The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History

Abstract

When I was in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1960s, nation-states were the self-evident focus for the discipline of history. Nations expressed people's identities, arbitrated their differences and solved their problems, focused their dreams, exercised their collective sovereignty, fought their wars. Modern professional historical scholarship grew up alongside the nation-state, its mission to document and explain the rise, reform, and fall of nation-states. And professional history developed a civic mission to teach citizens to contain their experience within nation-centered narratives. Now, a mere third of a century later, familiar nation-states look fragile, constructed, imagined, even as they possess the very real capacities to collect taxes, recruit and deploy armed forces, manage legal systems, and allocate resources. Their capacity to govern was battered from the Left in the 1960s and the Right in the 1980s, in slogans like self-determination that evoke people on the march and those like globalization that seem beyond human reach. While some movements challenged the sovereignty of established nation-states from above in the name of the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement, others challenged the sovereignty of established states from below in the name of the potential nation-states of Kosovo, Serbia, Chiapas, Quebec, Palestine, Scotland, Lombardy, East Timor, and Catalonia. With nationalisms exploding not only in movements for new nations but also in such diverse directions as Queer Nation, black nationalism, and Nation of Islam, the greatest threat to nation-states seemed often to come from nationalist movements. The spread across national borders of institutions such as multinational corporations and CNN, of social movements such as feminism and environmentalism, and