“It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies,” Richard Hofstadter famously wrote, “but to be one.”Footnote ¹ Defining that “American ideology” or “American creed” obsessed scholars of the consensus era, who celebrated (and occasionally lamented) Americans’ allegiance to a limited liberal vocabulary of rights, freedoms, and markets. The cultural transformations begun in the 1960s seemed to question the very idea of a unitary culture or creed, but some historians responded by exploring alternative ideological founding myths to the liberal consensus. Over the ensuing decades scholars mounted formidable efforts to support republicanism or millennial Christianity as challengers, but liberalism proved a resilient foe. And it seemed to have contemporary history on its side: during the Reagan revolution of the century's final decades the classic liberal combination of scaled-down government and free markets carried the day as Americans’ ideal if not their reality. The Lockean liberal tradition that Louis Hartz described a half-century earlier still appeared the only game in town, although scholars continued to argue over its terms, history, and boundaries.Footnote ²

Left largely unanalyzed in these debates was the place of nationalism in shaping American ideologies, even the assumption that there was an American creed. In the 1980s nationalism came under scholarly scrutiny as an “invented tradition,” a species of cultural hegemony that began to look less compelling during an era of ethnic resurgence and global integration. When left-leaning scholars led by the cultural turn and post-structuralism set about excavating the “deep structures” of American ideologies, none seemed more pervasive than “exceptionalism,” the notion that the United States developed in stark but beneficent opposition to Europe, exempt from the ills that pervaded the Old World or modern society more generally. Just as “individualism” had been coined as a critical term on the utopian-socialist left and migrated to the affirmative liberal mainstream, “exceptionalism” originated among Marxists of the 1930s who puzzled over the failure of the most advanced capitalist society to move toward socialism. Later viewed as a blessing rather than a curse, it became a buzzword for conservative pundits, while historians traced the concept's sway through American culture backward to Tocqueville, the colonial period, or even to European fantasies before the encounter of 1492.

Exceptionalism infused the liberal tradition with the emotional power of national belonging. In the influential cultural mappings produced by Sacvan Bercovitch in the 1990s, American liberalism and exceptionalist nationalism congealed into recurrent “rites of assent” that exerted a powerful ideological hegemony.Footnote ³ Bercovitch's brilliant, radical readings of American Renaissance writers suggested that by the antebellum era an American consensus had effectively reduced dissent to a form of liberal, mostly individualist, nationalism that sustained the culture even as it purported to challenge or reform it. Emerson's call for “self-reliance,” Lincoln's invocation of “free labor,” and even Frederick Douglass's questioning of the Fourth of July were potentially radical interventions that were transposed by the force of America's “symbolic lexicon” into expressions of confidence and continuity that affirmed the American system. In Bercovitch's work, Hartz's liberal America received a magic coating that deflected the barbs of dissenters and simultaneously absorbed them as fortifying agents.

It was not long before the new critical version of consensus seemed as confining as the old celebratory one. The recent movement to “internationalize” American history, and the “transnational turn” among historians generally, have taken their impulse from many forces, from the spread of world history in the college curriculum to the myriad manifestations of globalization. But one push toward a more cosmopolitan American history has surely come from the suffocating—and fundamentally implausible—sense of self-enclosure that exceptionalist premises impose on US history. Venturing beyond national boundaries, recent histories have recovered the Atlantic contexts of colonial society, the global migratory systems of which US immigration has been but one segment, and the transatlantic connections that linked American reform movements such as anti-slavery, women's rights, and Progressivism to counterparts abroad.Footnote ⁴

What impact will these transnational studies have upon scholars’ views of American ideologies? The answer is far from clear, but two thoughtful studies of the antebellum era, one centered on liberalism and the other on exceptionalism, offer clues. Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune features a close reading that situates its famous editor's reform ideas in the larger history of American liberalism, including influences from abroad. Distant Revolutions surveys Americans’ reactions to the European revolutions of 1848 in relation to their exceptionalist self-conceptions. Products of the new transnational intellectual history, both books derive much of their interpretive bite from the drama of antebellum Americans confronting external challenges to prevailing liberal and exceptionalist frameworks.

Constructing a coherent intellectual history of Horace Greeley and his newspaper is no easy task, given the notoriously variable opinions of the iconic editor and the grab-bag character of daily newspapers. Dense and deeply contextual, Adam Tuchinsky's writing adds to the challenge, but his book rewards the careful reader with insights into Greeley's syncretistic brand of liberalism. Although he acknowledges some of Greeley's maddening contradictions and his shifting positions over time, Tuchinsky stresses the basic underlying consistency in the editor's thinking. Moreover, he locates the Tribune's center of gravity precisely where some historians draw a major fault line: in Greeley's simultaneous promotion of Whig Party politics and Fourierist socialism. Greeley's biographers have either dismissed the latter as a passing fad or struggled to explain the editor's contradictory juggling of New York politics and French utopianism. By offering a close reading of Tribune editorials and correspondence and exploring their social and ideological contexts, Tuchinsky shows how French socialist reform and American mainstream political ideologies overlapped and interacted. Greeley used them to forge an amalgam of radical and conservative ideas that attracted many northern reform-minded contemporaries.

The alliance between Greeley and the Fourierists has been documented many times. Early in 1842 the fledgling New York editor allowed Albert Brisbane, Fourier's chief American disciple, to purchase a front-page column in his Daily Tribune. After eighteen months the column ended, but Greeley's editorials took up where they left off, promoting the doctrine of “Association” (as Fourier's American followers called it) through model cooperative communities, called “phalanxes.” Tuchinsky finds important convergences between Whig Party ideas and utopian socialism. From one side, reform Whigs promoted self-culture, habits of voluntary association, and a desire for social mobility and cohesion. Their arguments favoring the tariff condemned free trade in terms similar to early socialist critiques of free competition. From the other side, thanks to Brisbane and other publicists, Fourierism arrived stripped of radical implications for sexuality, family, religion, and private property. Its phalanxes recognized the rights of labor and capital and defused class tensions through joint prosperity. Tuchinsky acknowledges that Greeley espoused a particularly limited version of Fourierism that competed with capitalist enterprises rather than eliminated them. But he stresses instead the radical critique of capitalist organization that Fourierism pushed Greeley toward, arguing that Greeley's emphasis on the social origins of poverty, the perils of laissez-faire, and the “right to work” were important innovations in American liberal discourse.

By 1848 Fourierism was in decline as a movement of experimental communities, but the revolution in France, and especially its National Workshops, gave a more practical shape to utopian-socialist calls for the “organization of labor.” Tuchinsky makes his most original research contribution by unearthing the career of Henry Bornstein, a former associate of Karl Marx who penned militant eyewitness accounts of France's bloody June uprising against closing the National Workshops. Greeley supplemented these reports with correspondence from Charles Dana, Margaret Fuller, and Marx himself. Dana returned from Europe with plans for scaled-down “practical Association” via mutual banks and worker and consumer cooperatives, modeled more on Proudhon than on the Fourierists’ phalanx, which the Tribune avidly promoted and which spurred a wave of cooperative organizing among artisans in northern cities. Most of these worker associations lasted less than two years, plagued by shortages of capital, uncertain legal status, and competition with larger conventional firms. Thus Tuchinsky's evidence supports a view of the American 1848 as a turning point that failed, as in Europe. But he characteristically finds silver linings in the momentary “radicalization of the Tribune,” in the founding of worker cooperatives, and especially in utopian socialism's evolution from a sect to an “outlook and vocabulary” that later American radicals could absorb (Tuchinsky, 82, 92).

Despite the author's optimistic spin—whiggish with a small “w”—the most compelling story he tells concerns not the alleged oppositional afterlife of Greeley's Fourierist–Whig amalgam but how it went mainstream in the 1850s by merging into Republican Party ideology. Reviving an interpretation first championed by Progressive Era labor historian John R. Commons, Tuchinsky shows that Greeley played a key role in linking freedom of the public lands and limitation on homesteads—the land-reform program championed by George Henry Evans and promoted by several ex-Fourierists—with opposition to the extension of plantation slavery into western territories. Land reform spoke to northern workers’ ambitions to “vote yourself a farm,” Whiggish fears about growing inequality and social unrest, and the Fourierist view that capital and labor should be combined in the same persons. The idea of western lands as a social “safety valve” helped to build a cross-class coalition supporting the Republicans’ free-soil campaign.

Tuchinsky argues persuasively that Republican support for “free labor” was as multidimensional as that for free soil. In contrast to Eric Foner and others, Tuchinsky stresses the plasticity of the free-labor ideology and the variety of its adherents. In the 1840s, utopian socialists, labor reformers, and Greeley critiqued “so-called free labor,” and they carried a healthy skepticism about market inequities into the Republican coalition. In their view, northern wage slavery, though less heinous than its southern cousin, was also coercive and its evils should be addressed once the war was over. Smoothed over by the pressing crusade against southern slavery, cracks within the Republicans’ free-labor coalition resurfaced and then widened during the Reconstruction years as politicians debated the fate of emancipated slaves and the labor movement regrouped in the face of the large-scale industrialization that the war had promoted.

Unfortunately, Greeley was not up to the postwar challenge, for his Whiggish moralism and his faith in the harmony of interests under capitalism never disappeared. Greeley resisted the confiscation of rebel planters’ lands as too disruptive, and in an era when corporate growth outmoded small-scale remedies he advised northern workers to establish cooperative workshops rather than to strike or agitate for eight-hour legislation. By 1872, the laissez-faire version of free-labor ideology came to dominate political discourse through the political movement known as Liberal Republicanism. Ironically, Horace Greeley became the Liberals’ presidential candidate, swallowing his protectionist scruples and effectively abandoning the ex-slaves to their former masters. The “Second American Revolution” that Greeley and the Fourierists envisioned in the 1840s—extending democracy to society in addition to politics, in effect socializing American liberalism—ended up looking more like Charles Beard's version of a capitalist triumph. The fact that Greeley was carried along makes it especially hard for left sympathizers to cast his biography—intellectual or otherwise—as a success story.

Precisely because he acknowledges this, Tuchinsky's attempt to rehabilitate Greeley's contribution through flights of abstraction feels compensatory and strained. He envisions Greeley's position as the foundation for an alternative American social-democratic “tradition” that extends from the antebellum utopians to the New Deal, a “third way” that located itself between the poles of Marxist socialism and laissez-faire liberalism. This is an attractive idea, not least because it suggests a range of American liberalisms. Yet when Tuchinsky writes in this vein his analysis loses the intellectual precision and grasp of context that characterize its best passages. One indicator of this is the author's blanket use of “socialism” to mean something much more limited, often simply doubts about the effect of unbridled capitalism. Terms such as “liberal socialism,” “socialist liberalism,” and “social democracy,” which Tuchinsky uses interchangeably, ought to be carefully defined in a study that dissects liberal and socialist strands of thought. Was there only one “third way” or were there many varieties? If Greeley's social-democratic outlook stands at the beginning of its long genealogy, what exactly were its links to the next generation? Throughout the book, but especially at its end, the commitment to a deeply contextual approach conflicts with the ambition to outline persisting ideological “traditions.” The kind of intellectual history Tuchinsky espouses requires addressing discontinuities in American reform thought or else discussing recent research that bridges antebellum and postbellum reform, such as Timothy Messer-Kruse's study of the Yankee International.Footnote ⁵

Compared to these vague invocations of an enduring social-democratic tradition, the book's mid-level analysis is better rooted. Tuchinsky assesses the intellectual resources, domestic and foreign, that the Tribune marshaled to challenge and enlarge American liberalism. Along the way he hints at a more complex genealogy of “social liberalism” and implicitly broaches questions of transnational impact.

On the domestic front, Tuchinsky furthers the rehabilitation of the Whigs that was begun by Daniel Walker Howe, although unlike Howe he tends to neglect the evangelical Protestant component of the Whig coalition.Footnote ⁶ In response to historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz who trace a path directly from antebellum Democrats to FDR, Tuchinsky offers Greeley's reformist Whiggery as at least an equal forebear.Footnote ⁷ If the Democrats’ legacy to later social liberals was their egalitarian animus against monopoly and aristocracy, the Whigs bequeathed a communitarian ethos, statist solutions, and (at least in Greeley's reformist version) skepticism about the workings of unfettered capitalism. The two main antebellum party ideologies were products of divergent strands within liberalism, Tuchinsky asserts, and by selecting elements from each the scaffolding for a more socially conscious liberalism would eventually be constructed. This formulation coexists awkwardly with Tuchinsky's championing of the Whig Tribune as the font of social democracy. It has the ring of truth, however, and it siphons considerable heat from the tendentious and overly presentist debate over the New Deal's antebellum ancestry that Schlesinger set off in 1945 and that refuses to die.

Arriving from Europe, Fourierism posed an external challenge to liberal pieties. Utopian socialism offered a structural critique of capitalist competition and a program of nonstatist association that remained part of the Tribune's editorial platform and influenced American labor reformers beyond the failure of most phalanxes in the late 1840s. Admittedly these were cautious and halfway measures (as befit Greeley's conciliatory temperament), but the combination of radical social criticism and mild reform programs was an attractive one to socially engaged liberals, in the 1840s and ever since. Whether one sees Greeley's Fourierism as an alternative to capitalism (as Tuchinsky appears to) or an alternative version of it (as I and Howe do) depends largely on whether one limits capitalism to its laissez-faire version. In either case, it seems clear that contact with Fourierism, furthered by the Tribune's avid interest in the French revolution of 1848, introduced Greeley to a new social and economic vocabulary and stretched the boundaries of antebellum social discourse.

Something like this dynamic was repeated a half-century later when Progressive Era social scientists and reformers faced the imposing challenge of Marxian socialism and adopted some of its ideals and interim goals without crossing the line to revolution or state ownership of the means of production. In the first decade of the twentieth century many Progressives’ goal became “social justice without socialism,” the title of a tract by the American economist John Bates Clark. Like Liberal Republicans of the 1870s who turned against the labor movement after the Paris Commune, Clark had repudiated socialism after an anarchist bomb sparked the Haymarket Riot of 1886, but many of his colleagues retained the goal of “socializing” democracy. Rather than evidence of a continuous social-democratic tradition, this recurrent process of encounter and absorption lends support to the notion that the American liberal left's history has been episodic and memory-challenged. Yet like Greeley's biography it also shows that American liberalism, far from being a static creed, evolved in dialectical fashion when faced with foreign ideologies and events.

The confrontation of antebellum Americans with radical forces across the Atlantic is a major theme shared by Timothy Roberts's survey of the reverberations of the 1848 European revolutions among American observers. In contrast to Tuchinsky's deep and directive reading of Greeley, Distant Revolutions offers broad coverage and a gently suggestive interpretive line. Tracing developments in American politics, culture, reform, and foreign relations, Roberts unearths a trove of transatlantic reactions and connections, many of them previously unnoted because the literature on American responses to 1848 is so thin. Indeed, the mid-century revolutions were much less consequential to Americans than the French Revolution of 1789, which shaped the nation's nascent political parties, or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which arguably inaugurated the Cold War. But in an era when Americans looked anxiously to Europe for models of culture and evidence of progress or affirmation—which often amounted to the same thing—this Europe-wide “springtime of peoples” mattered a great deal to provincial onlookers who read about it through stories clipped from British papers and, in some cases, from articles written by the first corps of American correspondents sent to cover an overseas war.

Varied ideological objectives were at work in these revolutions, including European liberals’ demands to establish constitutional republics, socialists’ program to abolish class privileges or redistribute property, and nationalists’ call to separate from federative empires or to consolidate an existing patchwork of polities. Most Americans who assessed developments in Europe adopted a reductionist approach that singled out one or another of these facets as the central thrust of the revolutions and praised or censured them accordingly. After the June Days most American journalists fixed upon French socialism and “Red Republicanism” as the dreaded insurrectionary heart of the revolution. By contrast, many American commentators hailed attempted nationalist revolts from Hapsburg or Russian rule without even certifying that their goal was a republican government.

Another pattern seen in American responses was the typical arc from enthusiasm to disillusionment as the revolutions turned radical or were suppressed by reactionary monarchs. Initial reactions from the press and politicians were almost uniformly positive, and spontaneous celebrations erupted in several American cities. There was a strong element of self-congratulation here, exemplified by President Polk's gloating that “the great principles of popular sovereignty which were proclaimed in 1776 by the immortal author of our Declaration of Independence, seem now to be in the course of rapid development throughout the world.”Footnote ⁸ But southern voices of support trailed off when French revolutionaries emancipated West Indian slaves, and other American conservatives became horrified by most of the revolutions’ escalating violence. Finally, when Louis Napoleon's electoral victory in France presaged the return of authoritarian rule and was followed by the successful suppression of revolts in Hungary and Poland, many American commentators retreated in disappointment, postponing indefinitely their hopes that Europe would take a momentous step toward democratic progress.

Some readers will conclude from Roberts's survey that Americans merely used the revolutions to confirm their preexisting commitments. Despite the actions of a few “Young Ireland” and “Young America” enthusiasts who sent arms and volunteers to Europe, Americans held to the Monroe Doctrine's policy of nonintervention. State Department officials eagerly recognized the new republic in France and lectured foreign monarchs on the virtues of the US example, yet Congress sent no military aid to European freedom fighters. In the case of Italy, Americans’ religious divide—Protestant versus Catholic—was solidified by the Roman republic's attempt to secede from the Papal States. Likewise, reactions to the Hungarian nationalist Louis Kossuth's pronouncements during his celebrated American tour of 1851–2 divided predictably along sectional lines, with northerners and southerners taking offense at any hint that Kossuth tilted one way or the other about slavery. Kossuth himself parted disappointed, having raised no troops and only enough funds to cover his expenses. Occurring during the lull after the Compromise of 1850, the Hungarian hero's tour provided diversionary entertainment but changed little at home. “For all fruit of that stir,” Henry David Thoreau complained, “we have the Kossuth hat.”Footnote ⁹

Above all, the revolutions seemed to confirm Americans’ exceptionalist sense of their own history. When American commentators judged the European revolutions, Roberts shrewdly notes, they were simultaneously redefining their own. By the mid-nineteenth century the ritualized public ceremonies that commemorated the American Revolution in cities and villages across the land had evolved away from acknowledging the war's wrenching divisions and its trail of violence and moved toward idealizing the founders and the secure foundation they laid for prosperous nationhood. The failures of European revolutionaries in 1848 reinforced this trend. Compared to Europeans’ fleeting provisional governments, socialist-tinged policies, and military losses, the American independence movement seventy years earlier seemed exceptionally moderate and successful.

Any potential challenges to this reassuring narrative could be countered by the clever construction of exceptionalism as a two-sided coin, one that endorsed both America's uniqueness and its influence abroad. According to its tenets, US political institutions were the product of a unique history that developed blessedly apart from global trends, yet once codified they embodied universal truths that could (and should) be adopted everywhere. Reflected off the sides of this coin, Europe's liberal nationalist revolutions ratified Americans’ beliefs no matter how they turned out. If they succeeded, they demonstrated that American institutions were a model for others; if they failed, they showed that only Americans possessed the conditions suitable to republican success. Exceptionalism offered outsiders a rigged game of “heads I win, tails you lose.”

Nevertheless, Roberts's account makes clear that the European revolutions questioned Americans’ self-assurance in unsettling and significant ways. By tarnishing the “exemplarist” side of the coin the failures of 1848 did trouble some Americans. According to Roberts, disheartened domestic commentators drew from 1848 the lesson that republican institutions could be replicated, but republican virtue could not. Corrupted by centuries of subservience to aristocrats, priests, and monarchs, Europeans were not capable or ready to maintain republics. From today's perspective this conclusion might counsel more modest ambitions for exporting American ways, but many antebellum spokesmen believed firmly in the world-historical importance of the American example, and some were not prepared to accept this dismal diagnosis. Perhaps the problem was that the exemplar was flawed. By the early 1850s William Seward, Abraham Lincoln, and other northern free-soil spokesmen began arguing that American institutions could never be a compelling model for Europeans until slavery was put on the road to extinction. Drawing upon the commentary of European liberals such as Harriet Martineau, who lambasted Americans as slaveholding hypocrites, this argument appealed to reform-minded exemplarists and became standard ammunition in the Republican Party's arsenal.

The European revolutions looked like models, not cautionary tales, to other northern reformers who were moved by developments during 1848 to radicalize their thinking and to turn reflexively upon the failures of American society. Stirred by the French legislature's abolition of colonial slavery in 1848, Theodore Parker and Frederick Douglass moved from the anti-institutional stand of the Garrisonians toward a strategy that used political organizations such as the Free Soil party to attack slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew upon the example of European feminists of 1848 when she demanded the right of suffrage at the Seneca Falls convention. Philadelphia radical George Lippard, like Horace Greeley, adopted the French socialist program of worker cooperatives but promoted them through a strange amalgam of patriotism and class warfare. Most famously, Margaret Fuller's European odyssey, which introduced her to French utopian socialists and cast her fortunes with Italian republicans, warmed her to American abolitionism and communitarian reform. Roberts passes too quickly over American peace reformers, perhaps because their reaction to the revolutions and wars of 1848 was more ambivalent. But his point that revolutionary Europe inspired these reformers and radicalized their views highlights exchanges of sympathy, information, and tactics among transatlantic activists who believed that “in moral questions . . . there are no nations,” as Wendell Phillips declared, and who questioned America's fundamental difference from Europe.Footnote ¹⁰

The most striking transatlantic affinity prompted by the events of 1848 was the deepening perception that the Europeans’ fight against aristocracy and northerners’ opposition to the expansion of slavery were parallel struggles. From the Compromise of 1850 onward, the rhetoric of the revolutions penetrated American debates over slavery. Pro-slavery politicians labeled their opponents “Red Republicans” and soon “Black Republicans,” while anti-slaveryites tarred slave-owners as European-style “despots.” During the struggle in Kansas this kind of rhetoric reached a fever pitch as anti-slaveryites became convinced that a version of 1848 was taking place on American soil. Invoking the righteous example of European revolutionaries, abolitionists praised the free-state “Kossuths of Kansas” and endorsed the violent overthrow of the Slave Power aristocracy (Roberts, 177). From Harriet Beecher Stowe's vision of divine retribution for oppressors in Europe and America and William Seward's invocation of a “higher law” than repressive statutes on both continents, the distance was not far to John Brown's insurrectionary plot, whose tactics he evidently learned from the Italian revolutionary of 1848, Giuseppe Mazzini. Thoreau, who had belittled Kossuth, hailed Brown as the heroic liberator shaking the foundations of an American “government . . . allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind” (Roberts, 189). Kansas signaled an American reenactment of the recent European revolutions that culminated in all-out sectional warfare. The Civil War became the last aftershock of the earthquake that shook Europe in 1848, Roberts concludes.

This is a pulse-quickening crescendo that both challenges exceptionalist views and enlarges the context of the anti-slavery struggle. Instead of ending his story there, though, I would have liked Roberts to push forward in time, stand back from participants’ rhetoric, and broaden his comparative analysis. Did the 1848 revolutions spread a new notion of unified nationality that fueled Lincoln's opposition to a “House Divided”? Where does Roberts stand in scholarly debates over Lincoln in transatlantic context? Did Lincoln's opposition to southern secession complement or contradict his support for foreign revolutionaries? Did his views smoothly blend nationalism and liberalism, as David Potter and Thomas Bender contend, or did he represent the Bismarckian realpolitik of nation-building through violence, as Carl Degler and others have suggested?Footnote ¹¹ In pitting consolidating versus breakaway nationalisms, did the Civil War parallel the federative struggles of the Austrian empire, Germany, and Italy, or did its “exceptional” republican context vitiate this comparison? Addressing such questions would significantly multiply the book's reverberations.

Roberts's summary that “the 1848 revolutions did not by themselves cause the Civil War, but they did contribute to its timing and its meaning for many Americans,” is significant enough (20). At the least, it suggests one response to the question of how transnational studies might revise our picture of key American ideologies such as liberalism and exceptionalism: they can re-create the larger spatial and intellectual contexts in which Americans placed events, reminding us that confining intellectual histories within the nation's boundaries produces impoverished and even misleading interpretations. Especially when premised on the idea that common political and social trends were at work on both sides of the Atlantic, nineteenth-century Americans’ curiosity about Europe and their borrowings from abroad questioned claims of American separateness or incommensurability.

There is a larger theoretical issue lurking here about transnational encounters. Whereas decades ago leading literary- and cultural-history scholars were keen to trace authorial “influence” across national lines, more recently an appreciation of the multiple readings available to audiences has shifted scholars’ emphasis to the “reception” of foreign “cultural products.” One result is the frequent assertion—now seen as a truism—that receivers import, interpret, and even reconstruct foreign ideas to fit their pre-existing views and needs. Yet in their simplest forms, both influence and reception, with their polarized tropes of transformation and confirmation, divert us from the more revealing middle ground where transnational contacts create new affinities and stir innovative applications. Nineteenth-century Americans like Greeley, Frederick Douglass, or Margaret Fuller may have paid attention to overseas developments because they resonated with existing questions or beliefs, but the encounter offered new vocabularies, narratives, and strategies for attacking their problems. If we are chasing Americans who escaped liberal or exceptionalist ideas we are likely barking up the wrong tree. One cannot ask critics to transcend their culture—the very expression is probably oxymoronic. But they can deploy “alien” concepts to develop novel meanings and applications of shared ideologies in ways that expand their reach or shift the ground of discussion, at times decisively. To use current parlance, the operative phrase is not “thinking outside the box” but “pushing the envelope.”

If there is an “American ideology,” its key concepts are not fixed verities but “contested truths,” as Daniel Rodgers has noted, whose meanings participants in public life shift, stretch, and multiply over time, creating conflict and change.Footnote ¹² Some of the most important of these disruptions have been prompted by encounters with overseas events and foreign ideologies. By showing how two such mid-nineteenth-century encounters opened up contested ground within liberalism and exceptionalism, these studies highlight one of the many benefits that transnational approaches offer. After a numbing series of indictments of America's pervasive liberal hegemony and the tiresome tautologies of uncovering dissenters’ “complicity,” the transnational turn holds out hope that historians will produce fresher, less insular, and more dialectical accounts of American ideologies. This may be putting too much weight on the two small books under review, but with luck they will be harbingers of bigger things to come.