Writing North American History

Abstract

Although Alan Taylor and Andres Resendez write about different places at different times, their major theme is the same-a radical reconfiguration of local worlds precipitated by the expansion of the United States. Together, their papers offer us an opportunity to think continentally, to understand the history of the United States as part of the history of North America. As important, they provoke us to contemplate narratives of continental history that move beyond our customary stories of conquest and resistance. Borderlands, understood notjust as zones of cultural interaction but as fluid regions in which American Indians and Europeans renegotiated authority as well as alliances, were pivotal places in the making of North America as a whole.1 To think continentally is to understand that nationalism like class, to invoke E. P. Thompson's famous characterization of the latter, is cultural as well as political and that it exists in the endlessly fluctuating realm of human relationships and human constructions of their relationships, an insight exploited by Benedict Anderson.2 Diplomatic and military historians may legitimately quarrel with the novelty of thinking continentally, for the list of scholars who have profitably studied treaties, wars, and various exchanges among the nations and peoples of North America is long and impressive. Yet it is also true, as critics point out, that these historians tend to operate within the parameters of larger national or tribal narratives.3 Their questions and conclusions reflect the concerns of United States, Mexican, Canadian, Iroquois, or Apache history, not the history of the whole. The same is true of scholars who have compared various developments in Canada and the United States or Mexico and the United States usually to highlight something about the American experience by contrasting it with something else. To be sure, the nation-states that appeared in North America between 1776 and 1867 had much in common. They all emerged from colonial encounters; they all found national definition in rejection of European empires; they all expanded at the expense of American Indians; they all contended with slavery and colonial economies; they all dealt with regional rivalries that threatened to undermine their experiments in federalism. More and more historians, however, are interested in considering these issues less as aspects of national stories than as variations on themes, as local versions of a larger process.4 The proliferation of borderlands studies, whether under the rubric of frontier, Western, or colonial history, has pointed us in this direction. Informed by the work of scholars who specialize in other parts of the world, much of this literature is critical of white Americans, particularly the ways in which they employed race and gender to subordinate and exploit Africans and European immigrants as well as exterminate Native Americans.5 Continental history also builds on the idea of an Atlantic world developed by many recent scholars of colonial encounters from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. As critics lament, the emphasis on transnational history among American historians largely evaporates with the creation of nation-states. Post-colonial history is not nearly as cosmopolitan in method or as expansive in scale as colonial history.6 The most logical explanation of this sudden funneling of Atlantic history into American history or Mexican history or Canadian history lies in the very nature of nation-making, which requires the invisibility of other sources of identity and authority. To a considerable degree, nations were created by colonists who defined themselves against Europeans as well as Indians and Africans. Many fine scholars have attempted to demonstrate the existence of Atlantic connections in the nineteenth century. We no longer think of the United States as turning its back on Europe and progressing in some kind of exceptional isolation; its history is one especially important variation on developments affecting people throughout the world. …