The publication of Carl Guarneri's America in the world. United States history in global context is an important event. Editor of a pioneering anthology designed to introduce a comparative dimension into the college-level US history survey course (America compared. American history in international perspective, second edition 2005) and author of an important article in The History Teacher, introducing to teachers ways of responding to calls for a more global approach to US history (‘Internationalizing the United States survey course: American History for a global age’, 2002), Guarneri has now published one of the first textbooks that responds to this new historiographical interest in its whole structure, not just sidebars. Edward J. Davies's, The United States in world history (2006), was published earlier, but it is less comprehensive than Guarneri's. Its particular virtue is the richness of its discussion of economic and business themes, the dominant focus of the book. The most ambitious entry into the textbook market is Ian Tyrrell's Transnational nation. United States history in global perspective since 1789 (2007), but it has possible limitations as a textbook for the US survey in that it is thematically rather than chronologically organized, and it addresses only the period since 1789. Nonetheless, it is rich in fresh insight, showing most clearly the virtue of situating the United States in various transnational frameworks.

Guarneri's book is part of a series, ‘Explorations in World History’, and its focus on a nation is unique in that series. Such a focus presents a more complex and difficult narrative challenge than do histories that are not defined by a nation, such as global histories of oceans, commodities, religions, diasporas, transportation networks, and exchanges, all themes that have been prominent in recent world history scholarship. While all of these books, like Guarneri's, revise historical understandings in fundamental ways by expanding the frame, the curricular and civic role of a textbook for a national history makes for a different challenge. The author must serve two masters or agendas: the civic education of national citizens and the development of a cosmopolitan global awareness that nourishes citizens of the world.

The title of Guarneri's book is more accurate than the subtitle. While it combines global and comparative history, it is more a multiplicity of comparisons than a global framing of American history. Comparative and global perspectives are related, but they do different things, and a national history relates to them differently. A global approach will invite comparisons, but its difference is its narrative structure, which is global. It will evoke a shared history with local, particular outcomes. I suspect that, given the limited geographical knowledge that American students bring into a history course, they will find comparisons more manageable than a global perspective, which requires a larger historical imagination that will be forwarded by Guarneri's approach but which neither the teacher nor the author of the text can assume to be present.

The global approach may, however, address more effectively one of the key problems that Guarneri raises in his extremely informative introduction, which in itself will teach students a great deal about the craft of history and transnational approaches to it. He speaks to the great schism between US history and world history in the high school curriculum. World history, or more precisely a civilizational or regional approach to it, does less than global history to resolve that unfortunate separation. In practice, the older approach may actively reinforce the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary, thus giving sustenance to the popular tendency to identify ‘international’ as ‘them’. To overcome that tendency we need somehow to communicate something pointed out by New York's Journal of Commerce in 1898: we are, it observed, ‘part of abroad’.

The exclusion of the US from older versions of world history that move from one civilization to another over the course of the term, without much, if any, attention to their interconnections, might invite some comparisons but little sense of a shared history. In that model the United States could, of course, be studied as a civilization for a whole year either the year before or after the world history. But that, too, reinforces the schism. As world history courses morph into global history courses, with their emphasis on a connected global history in which many regions of the world share a history, this separation is more problematic, hence the importance of re-framing American history to prepare it for inclusion, so to speak. Guarneri clearly recognizes this, but his text would have a greater impact on the problem had he tilted it more toward a global history than he has.

My point here is to contextualize Guarneri's work and the historiographical choices he made. It is not at all to devalue the comparisons he offers, which are conceptually, empirically, and interpretively telling. They also do the important work of deprovincializing United States history. But, while we commend Guarneri's path-breaking work, we need to keep pushing for a more global approach.

Guarneri is also concerned to deal with the problem of American ‘exceptionalism’. He offers a fascinating account of different exceptionalisms, and he challenges them by making telling comparisons. While this might deprovincialize, I am not sure that it will either elucidate or challenge the deepest and most problematic assumption buried in American exceptionalism, which is often erroneously confused with uniqueness. Uniqueness is, in fact, the way of the world: all peoples, all individuals participate in their own uniqueness. The challenge and claim of American exceptionalism is, as Daniel Rodgers has recently argued, far more profound: it is a claim that the United States does not share the history of any other nation and is the exception to an assumed rule or norm. That is the foundation of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ conception. That is the problem, and I think only a global approach, not a series of comparisons, no matter how illuminating in each instance, can undercut that deep and troubling assumption or, even, faith.

The issues I have raised so far are big historiographical ones that warrant discussion as we rethink the way we teach American history in a self-consciously global era. They speak less to the current classroom value of the book, which is quite substantial. It is concise and reasonably priced. It is not one of those bloated textbooks–outsized and out-priced–that are increasingly a plague. Better yet, it is at once sophisticated enough and accessible enough that it can be used in either a high school or college US survey. The brevity, however, is both a virtue and a potential problem–or teaching opportunity. A number of the more complex discussions are so compressed that they will either invite projects for further student inquiry or require expansion and elucidation by the teacher. For the increasing numbers of children of immigrants in our classrooms, a more global approach will ring true. And all students who have gone through the American education system, whether as children of immigrants or not, will, I suspect, appreciate an alternative to the same old teleological story, repeated two or three times in their K-12 education, of the immanent (and isolated) unfolding of American history.