Terms such as transnational history, global history, and entangled histories are all the rage in the American academy and are gaining increasing acceptance in other countries as well. Within US history, attempts to self-consciously “internationalize” scholarship began in the early 1990s with support from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The La Pietra Conferences of 1997–2000 promoted the institutional agenda, focussing on research implications. Subsequently many efforts have been made to integrate the findings of that growing corpus of scholarship into teaching. America on the World Stage is part of this latter effort, and again is the outgrowth of an OAH initiative. The articles in this collection began as contributions to the OAH Magazine of History. They are aimed at college and high-school teachers, and the work should be of interest to all practitioners of American history.

Appropriately Thomas Bender, the major force behind the La Pietra project, provides a concise overview of American historiography on the subject of cross-national connections. This is followed by a series of paired essays, the first in each group by a leading specialist in fields of US history from the colonial era through to the Cold War. These experts sum up in succinct terms the ways their own particular topic can be integrated into curricula, and briefly synthesize the available research literature. Each includes a useful bibliographical essay. These specialist contributions are followed in each pairing by a contribution from a college or high-school teacher. The latter explore lesson plans, pose classroom questions, and tell how the topics of the specialist have changed their teaching and/or provided issues that can be used in classroom situations.

Contributions from leading historians include David Armitage's distillation of his global history of the American Declaration of Independence, Daniel Rodgers (on reform movements, drawn mostly from his Atlantic Crossings volume), Stephen Aron on frontiers (making comparisons of different “settlement societies” and showing the interconnectedness of western American development with global patterns), Leila Rupp on modern feminism since World War II, and Edward Ayers on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Patrick Wolfe distils with analytical clarity his well-known comparative study of race, racialization, and citizenship. Mark Noll suggests that international connections were relatively less important in the nineteenth century for American religion because earlier European-derived church structures and beliefs had to adapt to unique political changes, to reflect the freedom of religion brought by the American Revolution and democracy. Nevertheless, he documents a whole series of cross-national exchanges in religion, including transatlantic revivalism; cites the importance of Protestant hymns that were often British; and notes British influence through models of voluntary societies and Social Gospel movements. Neither is the role of the Catholic Church as a transnational institution neglected in this informative piece.

The accompanying chapters on implementing the new global approach in the classroom provide practical aid to teachers; the authors ask new questions and add documents that can be used to structure discussion. All this is valuable, but the teaching contributions are unevenly integrated. Some, such as Oliver Vernon Burton's reflection on Patrick Wolfe's essay, only loosely consider the essays that precede them. Ted Dickson gives illuminating teaching strategies and documents on the Civil War, while others, such as Kathleen Dalton, focus more on intellectual assessments. Fred Jordan's “Teaching the Cold War” is less a classroom exercise providing practical tools than a reflection on concepts.

Suzanne Sinke's impressive research summary on migration displays both analytical insight and illuminating detail on how immigration history is multilateral, and part of global circulatory systems. But when Louisa Bond Moffitt and Dickson in the teaching chapter on migration explain strategies and methods, they gravitate towards material from nation-state records, and divide it into categories that emphasize immigration. Though they accept the idea of migration as a complex set of transnational and global circulations, they do not get students to consider migration within either Europe or the United States as part of the circulatory system.

The transnational connections illustrated in this book are mostly in the Atlantic world, a tendency noticeable in the case of the two chapters on reform and, more understandably, in those on slavery (though slavery had its contemporaneous Indian Ocean history that is neglected here). Women's suffrage is discussed without Australia and New Zealand, the first places to grant women's right to vote as well as subjects of obvious comparison with the United States. Generally the Pacific gets short shrift (with just one explicit reference, 284), though race relations, foreign policy, and migration issues deal tangentially with this region. More attention could be given to regional transnational as opposed to global history, as suggested in Bender's introduction, and also to considering how teachers might understand, critique and historicize the totalizing concept of globalization itself. One glaring omission is environmental history, surely one of the most important areas of global history, and one where national boundaries are relatively less important than in many others.

Overall, this is a worthy volume; it cannot do everything, and it does make a valuable contribution. However, there are limits to the formulation used here and widely adopted in the United States in response to the La Pietra Report – in which “America” and the “world” are set as terms of reference. As many of these essays illustrate, such a formulation makes US history more cosmopolitan in outlook, but does not clarify the relations between the nation-state on the one hand and transnational/global processes on the other.