Historians across Borders marks the maturation of United States history as a field within European universities. American exchange efforts during the Cold War, particularly the Fulbright Program, and fading anti-American sentiment since the Vietnam War, have led history departments across Europe to hire more historians of the United States. A thriving network of American studies organizations as far flung as the Balkans reflects this trend. More than six hundred positions in United States history now exist in Europe, an increase from only a handful of posts in 1945. The United Kingdom claims around a third of these historians. The authors note that Ohio State University has as many historians of the United States as there in all of Italy and twice as many as in Poland, Ireland, or the Netherlands. Nevertheless, American historians based in Europe are expanding beyond English or literature-heavy American studies departments.

The contributors concentrate on patterns within eleven European countries, though a concluding section offers added perspective from scholars in Russia, Australia, and Japan. The collection is a landmark text critiquing “the outsider as privileged observer” while also engaging how “institutional and cultural factors shape the writing of history” (ix, x). The chapters offer revealing surveys of historiography about the United States within several countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, and Russia, among others. The authors also recount in engaging fashion the development of history departments and the impact of geopolitics in fostering or impeding the study of the United States since the American Revolution. This book is part intellectual history, part history of European history departments. The analysis of how foreign perspectives influence the study of the United States carries considerable significance well beyond the subject matter considered by Historians across Borders; surely faculty employed far from the geographic focus of their work should contemplate similar issues of viewpoint in their scholarship.

Before I continue, I wish to explain my perspective – a very American approach to writing, according to these authors. I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. To be frank, other than the weather, I have found living in College Station, Texas, more foreign than living in Belfast. This speaks to the influence of Irish immigrants on New Orleans, the appreciation of American roots music across the Emerald Isle, and the homogeneity of urban life populated by all-too-familiar eatery and shopping chains. My paternal grandfather, whom I knew well, was a Lithuanian immigrant born in the 1890s. My mother was born in the late 1940s in war-ravaged Germany. Until I was about five years old, she and I spoke strictly in German. My father served over twenty years in the United States Air Force. He was part of a United Nations force sent to Congo during its break from Belgium in the early 1960s; he was stationed in Saigon at the time of the Tet offensive. One uncle served in France during the Second World War; another uncle fought in Korea. In short, foreign and global perspectives have always influenced my interpretation of American history. Living abroad has had little impact on the direction of my own research or much of my teaching. Living abroad is, after all, something of a family tradition.

My career path is therefore far less of a foreign adventure than it might seem. As the authors argue, the ease of transatlantic travel since the 1970s has allowed academics to maintain their professional profile in the United States and elsewhere while also visiting far-flung archives. Electronic forms of communication such as Skype and online databases of primary materials make researching from afar simpler. This is especially true for topics related to the United States, where moneyed corporations, historical societies, and universities have pioneered uploading newspapers, oral histories, and other materials. As a cultural historian, I would be lost without access to Google Books, the Wright Fiction Collection, or other online resources.

Historians across Borders could elaborate on the all-too-brief comments about undergraduate teaching. The varying structures of undergraduate teaching shape the field of United States history in Europe. In the United States, I typically assigned between four and six books for an upper-level undergraduate class. Such a culture does not exist in Northern Ireland or other parts of the United Kingdom, where universities often do not even possess an academic bookstore. Syllabi for undergraduate courses are thus weighted with journal articles. The course load for university students in the United Kingdom is narrowly focussed. Undergraduates emphasize study of a particular discipline or two – their majors. Students at Queen's University Belfast are thus graduated after passing three courses worth three credit hours each semester for three years. This is a total of fifty-four contact hours. Though likewise focussed on a particular discipline or two, American students must also complete a common curriculum involving a wide range of disciplines that sees them enrolled in five courses a semester at three credit hours each for four years. Thus a student at my undergraduate institution – Loyola University New Orleans – completes a total of 120 contact hours. Put another way, undergraduates in the United Kingdom receive their diplomas at a stage when many American students would only be in the second half of their sophomore year. The lack of a common curriculum thus impedes European students’ abilities to compete with American-trained students. For professional historians, the system in the United Kingdom reduces the number of courses, topics, and thus jobs available.

A similar difference occurs at the postgraduate level. On this topic, Historians across Borders astutely reveals the wide-ranging paths to obtaining a doctorate in Europe. Requirements dictate that students avoid English in France and Poland unless an exemption is attained. Some systems require supervisors to be full professors, limiting the range of topics students undertake. Graduate students in the United Kingdom complete their MA and PhD with far fewer courses than graduate students in the United States. Again, this means that European universities possess less need for faculty than American universities, which clearly impacts upon the range and depth of topics that departments can afford to cover. Little wonder that historians of the United States are in such small number throughout Europe while the United States possesses such a large range of historians working on other nations.

These points about teaching echo a key issue raised by Historians across Borders. The contributors identify a

Language barriers remain significant since foreign-language requirements for graduate students in the United States are far from rigid within most programs. So Europeans, with stronger language programs, more easily cross borders. The reasons why scholars in Europe undertake a more comparative approach also has much to do with employability. For instance, I have guided my doctoral students to undertake a comparative approach. One situated United States electoral politics of the 1840s in the global context of the Irish famine and European revolutions; another examines transatlantic memories of slavery as represented at particular modern museums in Ulster, England, and the United States; my third doctoral student is studying the international context of the gay rights movement by comparing events in Boston and Belfast. A comparative framework better prepares scholars trained in Europe for teaching jobs in the United States that require coverage of world history and other such courses. More importantly, linking Ireland or the United Kingdom to events in the United States makes justifying the historical work of the doctorate easier for students competing for jobs both within and beyond academia. This is obviously far less of a concern for American graduate students working on the United States at domestic institutions.

Historians across Borders provides a sharp analysis of transnational trends in United States history and the influence of American academia in setting dialogue within the field. Yet a chapter on how graduates from American doctoral programs land positions in Europe teaching the history of the Caribbean, Asia, or other specialty area would likely augment the claims made by the contributors. The prominence of American-trained faculty in Europe goes beyond United States history. At my own institution, the historians covering Spain, Germany, and Africa are all products of American graduate programs. Scouting the websites of other history departments at United Kingdom universities suggests a similar occurrence. The presence of these historians certainly reinforces the argument that the American university system is a behemoth impossible to ignore in any historical field. Furthermore, the hiring of American-trained scholars of non-US subjects might have facilitated the development of United States history in departments around the world. Familiarity, in other words, likely lessened the stigma that some foreign universities expressed toward the United States as a subject in the aftermath of Vietnam.

On a related point, the collection largely overlooks how attitudes toward publishing – and more importantly marketing – influence historians of the United States in Europe. With regard to the United Kingdom, the authors note that historians have more easily engaged “with the trends of U.S. history writing in the United States … courtesy of a common language, a ‘special relationship,’ and, increasingly, a common publishing market” (12). The language might be shared, but a stark difference in style exists. American writing is less formal, more forthright about its authors' personal investment in the material, and known for the “frequency with which historians make explicit links between past and present” (37). This stylistic difference matters considerably to students in Europe – in the same way students have commented that American faculty members are more egalitarian in interactions and clearer in demonstrating the relevance of the past.

The book market is remarkably different between academic presses in the United States and the United Kingdom. Within the United Kingdom, fixation with the Research Excellence Framework (REF), in which academics' publications are reviewed and rated every five years, places emphasis on rapid publication. This dissuades authors from undertaking time-consuming projects. Particular presses, such as Cambridge and Oxford, are held in high esteem. REF reviewers use a one-to-four-star ranking system and its accompanying “puerile nomenclature” of “nationally recognized,” “internationally recognized,” “internationally excellent,” and “world-leading” respectively. The reputation of the press partly guides assessment of the publication (66). But as I learned after searching for colleagues' books, presses in Ireland and the United Kingdom, more frequently than American presses, publish small runs typically only in hardcover. One colleague's recent book in Irish history costs £65.00 ($106.07) in hardcover, the only form available. Another colleague's recent book on British history costs £25.00 ($38.70) for a softcover copy. These are suitable for library purchases but, given the prices, not for mass readership. What good is a “world-leading” book that few people can afford to buy and read? Ian Tyrrell, in his contribution about United States history in Australia, acknowledges the “magnetic pull” of American publishers “since the U.S. market can still sustain monographic publication in a way that few others can” (183). Indeed, browsing through the catalogues of university presses in the United Kingdom is striking for the sheer disregard of cover art. While a cover should never define a book, the jacket should at least catch the eye. Historians who publish with European presses thus confront difficulty in gaining wider relevance since they are priced out of the market. This goes a long way to explaining why historians around the world cannot ignore American presses where affordability and accessibility go hand-in-hand and where the large numbers of undergraduate and graduate courses buttress sales.

The collection does not unpack the economic reasons for the hegemony of American universities, a point raised by François Furstenberg in the concluding chapter. Furstenberg remarks that the “overwhelming feature of U.S. academia” is that American universities “are not just rich; they are filthy rich” (210). Consider that the current acquisitions budget for the Irish National Library is a meager €300,000 ($380,000), while the acquisitions budget for Emory University, a key collector of contemporary Irish manuscripts, stands at €8·2 million ($10.6 million).Footnote ¹ Consider that the endowment of Vanderbilt University, from which I received my doctorate, stood at a market value of £2.2 billion ($3.6 billion) in 2013.Footnote ² The GDP of Northern Ireland for 2013 was £29.5 billion ($47.87 billion).Footnote ³ In other words, the endowment for a single American university is equivalent to 7.5 percent of the GDP of Ulster. Such figures are staggering. Cash-strapped universities in the United Kingdom have long been dependent on the whims and dictates of government. Tuition fees were nonexistent until 1998, when students began paying £1,000. Parliament raised fees to £3,000 in 2004 and £9,000 in 2012. The endowment at Queen's University Belfast – worth £48.8 million ($79.2 million) in 2013 – offers little financial cushion.Footnote ⁴ Only now are universities in the United Kingdom gaining some financial independence. These universities are simultaneously enhancing their marketability by becoming more responsive to the wants and interests of students. Historians across Borders addresses increased competition across Europe for funding and the emphasis on academic networks in government-sponsored schemes meant to spread the wealth. Though how this wealth disparity between the United States and Europe shapes historical scholarship and teaching deserves closer attention.

Finally, as the authors contend, the culture in the United Kingdom gives added importance to the study of the United States. The authors note the “popularity of American political and constitutional history, an interest in labor history, and proliferating studies focused on race” across Europe (23). Certainly topics related to slavery and civil rights are particularly well represented in the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland, these issues – from abolitionism to the civil rights movement – carry special resonance. American debates about freedom have heavily influenced events in Ireland since the 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen, a movement inspired by the rhetoric of the American Revolution. However, the focus on the racial history of the United States often seems a way to bypass uncomfortable questions about racial and ethnic diversity within the United Kingdom. Sharp political divisions remain – from a left that retains an anachronistic, pro-communist element and a right that contains an unapologetic, pro-fascist segment. This seems why “British academia was not listening in the late twentieth century” to the stories of black Britain (53). The authors claim that the ubiquitous media coverage of the American civil rights movement via new satellite technology in the 1960s made those events “much more familiar than the British one” (53). The authors argue that the movement provided lessons for British society in the wake of urban race riots in the 1980s, most notably in Toxteth and Brixton. Yet this focus also suggests a reluctance to address the difficult topic of economic segregation within the United Kingdom. After all, the authors' comment that the “absence of an equivalent minority group in the United Kingdom meant that the story of Native Americans did not resonate there,” in contrast to the history of African Americans, rings hollow (53). The Irish certainly come to mind; scholars of colonial America have come to recognize how the British incorporation of Ireland influenced subsequent British colonization efforts. But addressing that history with its own civil rights movement and lengthy terror campaign by the Irish Republican Army is a sensitive subject indeed.

Furthermore, the very structure of the United Kingdom is under scrutiny. Questions linger about whether Northern Ireland might some day join the Irish Republic or whether Scotland may again attempt independence. Under such tenuous circumstances, interest in the American Civil War and secession is understandable. Not surprisingly, historians of the United States working in the United Kingdom have “sought to use the [American] South to engage with present-day concerns” (52).

As Historians across Borders suggests, the dialogue among all historians of the United States is a discourse influenced by globalization of America's political ideas, cultural capital, and economic reach. Tellingly, universities in the United Kingdom joust for position on the annual World University Rankings of Times Higher Education and other such global league tables. In contrast, American universities compete for position on the U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings, focussed solely on institutions within the United States. Both are fictions in terms of assessing quality of education, though both reveal much about a university's view of itself in the world. Historians living abroad gain significant perspective on the American past and the influences of that past on the modern world. As Thomas Bender writes in his chapter, this volume is a “marvel” of cooperation across borders and languages (173). The writing flows smoothly. The historiographies are succinct yet wide-ranging. The examinations of university bureaucracies are engagingly unraveled – a praiseworthy achievement in itself. This is a book about the craft and purpose of the historical profession. This is a book for all historians.

This is so thoughtful, polished, and self-reflexive a volume of essays that it is difficult to think of anything to say about the subject that has not been anticipated between its covers. Still, there are some points that I would like to take up and explore further as they resonate so strongly with my experience as a British Americanist recently transplanted to California. One of these is the collection's insistence on geographical location as an influence on the practice of history. Detailed and fascinating comparisons between different European countries reveal institutional arrangements perceived as universal and natural in one but as peculiar and even eccentric in another. What contrasts have most struck me on moving from the UK to the US? One is the all-consuming importance of the tenure process, a crucial determinant of the overall trajectory of research careers, with junior faculty much more strongly motivated (and, often, better supported institutionally) to publish than their tenured colleagues. (Despite its obvious drawbacks, the national research exercise regime in the UK does at least incentivize universities to support the research of faculty at all career stages.) Another contrast is the relatively proprietary nature of teaching in the US, with team-taught classes, even in survey courses, much rarer than in the UK, and comparatively little of the external evaluation apparatus designed to ensure at least the appearance of uniform standards. A third contrast, peculiar to US history, is the greater degree of chronological specialization permitted by the high density of American historians in most history departments, a factor which also tends to reduce contact with colleagues in other fields and disciplines. Finally, the sheer vastness of the American history enterprise viewed nationally inevitably makes for less of a sense of “imagined community” amongst Americanists in the US than in the UK.

Partly as a consequence of these and other contrasts relating to audiences and politics documented here in such impressive detail, American historians located in Europe have brought perspectives to bear on the subject that differ from those of their US-based counterparts, often in productive ways. Reading this volume reminded me of the importance of European contributions to the understanding of a number of topics that I have encountered in the course of my research and teaching career. One is the transformation of immigration history that resulted in large part from interventions by Frank Thistlethwaite and others, changing the story of immigrants from one focussed on the US and the differing degrees of assimilation into American society of various national groups to a richer, more complex narrative incorporating homeland motivations, a multiplicity of migration routes and destinations, and the persistence of ethnic origins in the New World.Footnote ¹ Another advance in understanding pioneered in Europe came in the history of American foreign relations, with European historians being among the first to challenge the traditional, binary framework of Cold War historiography and explore the active role of nations beside the US and communist superpowers. Combining this insight with the concerns and techniques of cultural studies, scholars such as Reinhold Wagnleitner, Rob Kroes, and Alexander Stephan produced a particularly stimulating body of work about the reception of American popular culture and cultural diplomacy in Cold War Europe, eschewing simplistic notions of “Americanization” in favor of scenarios involving active local appropriation.Footnote ² Most recently, Odd Arne Westad, a Norwegian based at the London School of Economics, has further decentered the US from the Cold War narrative – and shifted attention away from the European theater of the East–West conflict – by investigating the agency of elites in the Third World, the “Global South,” revolutionizing the field of Cold War history in the process.Footnote ³

Small wonder, then, that the US historical profession, embarking as it recently has on its widely heralded transnational and global turns, should have reached out to European Americanists, rewarding them with prizes and senior positions at research universities. Meanwhile, in another development occurring haltingly and unevenly across the Continent, but noted by almost all the contributors to this volume, younger American historians in Europe are increasingly attending meetings of US scholarly associations and publishing in US venues, becoming self-identified members of “a global community of historians of America” who (to borrow from Michael Heale) just happen to live in Europe. The fact that European Americanists tend to be better networked with their colleagues in the US than with their fellow US specialists in neighboring countries is both contributory cause and consequence of this trend. The irony, of course, as observed piquantly here by François Furstenberg, is that the more European historians of the US “go native,” the more they are surrendering the position of marginality that gave them their privileged, outsider perspective in the first place.

I think that Furstenberg has something here. Take again the case of the UK, so often the first point of entry and bridgehead for American influence in Europe. True, the recent Americanization of US history as it is practiced in the UK has produced some first-rank American historians who are excelling in the US academic marketplace while still speaking with a British accent. Yet, at the risk of sounding nostalgic before my time, I wonder if something has not been lost in the transition to a shinier, more American model. The founding generation of American studies in Britain, several of whose members were still around when I first entered the profession in the early 1990s, had their intellectual weaknesses and blind spots, but they also had a movement élan bred of their outsider status (most were from provincial, grammar-school backgrounds, and enjoyed thumbing their noses at the stuffy traditionalism of the Oxbridge-dominated academic establishment). In addition to other (I think) admirable qualities – their willingness to explain their subject to public as well as academic audiences, their appetite for tackling big, thematic questions in US history and literature, and their interdisciplinarity – the pioneers of American studies also knew how to hold a lively conference. Compared with the slick programming, (relatively) luxurious accommodations, and undercurrent of professional anxiety detectable at meetings of major scholarly associations in the US, British Association of American Studies annual conferences had an endearingly friendly, spontaneous, even wacky feel to them which did not diminish the undoubted intellectual excitement I felt when I took advantage of the multidisciplinary conference programs to listen to papers on film or literature. Later, as the early American generalists faded from the scene, and American studies as an area subject came under the cosh from hostile governments and cost-cutting university management, historians and cultural studies practitioners drifted apart into separate organizations more directly associated with their cognate disciplines in the US, and some of that scope for cross-disciplinary interaction was lost, along with a bit of the fun. (In this connection, I should also say that I am heartened by signs of the recent revival of the American studies project in the UK caused by the Obama effect, and the disciplinary breadth and high quality of recent BAAS programs.)

In other words, I share Furstenberg's fear that the success of European Americanists in achieving recognition within the US history profession might compromise their peculiarly valuable vantage point. That said – and again, as is typical of this volume, Furstenberg makes this point too – I am also skeptical about the implication in some essays that Europeans function as a kind of saving remnant of cosmopolitan consciousness within the field of American history, rescuing their benighted US-based colleagues from the errors of provincialism and exceptionalism. For one thing, this suggestion fails to take account of the long history of intellectual exchange between Americans and Europeans that preceded the present transnational and global moment. Furstenberg summarizes this tradition brilliantly, so I will not labor the point here, except to underscore his defense of the “much-maligned” school of consensus historians, in particular Louis Hartz. It is a gross misreading of Hartz and the equally cosmopolitan Richard Hofstadter to dismiss them as nationalistic celebrants of the political consensus they identified as a peculiarly strong characteristic of the American past. With their intellectual roots in the doctrinal debates that had taken place on the Old Left during the 1930s, Hartz and Hofstadter could be more accurately read as attempting to explain the same problem that engaged Marxists such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci; that is, the lack of revolutionary class conflict in advanced capitalist societies. It is also worth noting in this connection that the very notion of exceptionalism itself sprang out of efforts by American communists to theorize the puzzling non-materialization of the proletarian revolution in the US. Thus a concept often construed from abroad as a particularly egregious sign of American intellectual insularity and complacency was in fact critical and transnational in origin.

Finally, returning to where we started, the volume's central argument about the importance of location, I would like to suggest one other reason for not getting too carried away in assigning a saving role to European Americanists. While focussing chiefly on the variety of systems and approaches to be found in Europe, the volume avoids the trap of constructing too undifferentiated and monolithic a US, acknowledging the country's extraordinary institutional and regional diversity – but I think this point could be carried even further. As Trevor Burnard and Cécile Vidal note in their essay about early American history, several US historians have recently pointed attention away from the Atlantic seaboard to the very different colonial history of the mid-western hinterland, a “Middle Ground” of European imperial rivalries, greater Native American agency, and fluid borderlands. More recently still, there has been a growth of interest in the Spanish and Russian experiences on the West Coast, and the emergence of the new paradigm of “Pacific history,” similar to the by now well-established school of Atlantic history in its emphasis on connectedness, circulation, and entanglement. Teaching as I do at a large, public, urban campus in California (where, sadly, the faculty are not quite as pampered as Furstenberg's depiction of spoiled US academics might lead one to suppose), my classroom contains many more students from Asian, Pacific Islander, or Latino backgrounds than it does Euro-Americans. With the likely continuing growth of these population groups, and the ongoing emergence of China as the regional economic superpower, future generations of Americans will surely be even more oriented toward the Pacific as opposed to the Atlantic, and the teaching of history at US institutions will presumably reflect that reality. Then the marginal, extra-European players represented in the fourth part of the volume will move to center stage, and the importance of location will become evident all over again.

To live in America is to know that the United States is a religious nation. The churches that dot the American landscape are full of devoted churchgoers. Full pews are a familiar sight. The same cannot be said of Denmark. Even as gorgeous medieval churches sit at the center of that nation's many lively town squares and pedestrian walkways, few Danes attend church regularly. Danish churches are important cultural landmarks, and for that reason are preserved by a religious tax that most Danes accept as a responsibility to the greater national good. But despite such state support, Danish churches are not really places of worship, at least not like American churches. The vast majority of Danes are atheists or agnostics. They only enter churches a few times each year, usually for milestone events like weddings and confirmations.

This enormous gap separating American and Danish rates of church attendance had interesting consequences for me during my one-year teaching fellowship at Southern Denmark University (SDU) (sponsored by the Fulbright Scholar Program, which has facilitated the international exchange of scholars since 1946). My Danish students knew some about American culture, most of which they picked up from American television programs like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, shown on Danish public television. They knew that the United States is a very religious country and that American religion manifests itself in ways that make the United States different from Denmark and the rest of secular Europe. They knew, for instance, that many Americans do not accept the premises of biological evolution due to religious beliefs, which they thought was plain weird.

Coming to terms with the perspective of my Danish students was pedagogically useful. It forced me to think about American history in comparative terms, to think about how strange the United States can seem to outsiders. Teaching American religious history to Danes meant that I had to make the strange more familiar so that they could relate to it. I emphasized that religious Americans have much more in common with contemporary Danes than with early Americans. For example, even Pentecostals who speak in tongues during worship services, as alien as it gets to secular Danes, watch popular television shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead and otherwise experience modern mass culture in similar fashion.

When teaching American religious history to Americans my objective is exactly the opposite. My goal there is to make the seemingly familiar strange, to accentuate those aspects of American religious history that challenge their contemporary sensibilities. As a result of the culture wars, most of my American students assume that religious people are conservative. Thus, learning that the militant abolitionist John Brown, leader of one of the most radical movements in American history, was also a devoted Christian who murdered pro-slavery activists in the name of God disturbs their presentist notions about the politics of religion.

In short, when it comes to teaching history, place matters. That place matters in the work of history is the main argument that threads the useful collection of essays edited by Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal, Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age. More specifically, writing and teaching the history of the United States from another place is necessarily “a comparative exercise” (xvi).

My SDU colleague David Nye, an American who has taught in Denmark for over three decades, and the author of one of the livelier chapters in this book – “Not Quite at Home: Writing American History in Denmark” – makes clear that the questions he asks about American history have been shaped by the Danish perspective on the United States:

Nye's renown as a cultural historian of electrification, blackouts, the assembly line, and technology more generally owes in part to his Danish experience, which has afforded him a productive lens from which to analyze the American experience.Footnote ¹

Historians across Borders is about how place shapes our historical understandings. In this way the book speaks to the philosophy of history and historiography broadly. But at a more specific level Historians across Borders is about how the place of Europe shapes historical understandings of the United States. It grapples with the question of what the distance that separates Europe from the United States – geographical, moral, and institutional distance – does to the study of American history.

That European scholars take different approaches to the American past than do their colleagues in the United States is undoubtedly the result of place, or as most historians like to say, context. Distinct contexts provide alternative lenses. Context can even shape stylistic and linguistic disparities that result in tonal dissonance. Unlike many American historians in the United States who tell the story of “our history,” historians in Europe tend not to use the collective “we” when writing about their own countries. The history of European nationalism is too shot through with atrocities for such national attachment. Somehow American historians in the United States remain aloof from the American nation's atrocities in places like the Philippines and Vietnam even as they declare a connection with the people and movements from the American past with whom they identify. Perhaps this is what Jackson Lears means when he says “it takes a foreigner to clear the air of cant.”Footnote ² Of course, sometimes history across borders results in incommensurability. In Germany, for example, the word “race” is conceived in its narrow biological sense, unlike in an American context where “race” is widely used to describe ambiguous cultural and social phenomena. In short, history across borders opens up a whole new set of challenges and possibilities.

The European context has shaped the topics that American historians in Europe have chosen to study. For example, there is a distinctly European preoccupation with constitutional and political aspects of American history because European democratic political reformers often use the American model as a model for what to do – or what not to do. American historians in Europe have also focussed their attention on race. The experience of race in the United States seems uniquely American even to those historians desperate to explode the myth of American exceptionalism. Perhaps now that Europe has more recently had its own acute racial problems, the American experience will come to seem much less unusual. As the authors of chapter 1 write, “Contemporary ethnic tensions in Europe have … sustained interest in the history of American race relations” (29). My Danish students were motivated to learn the history of American race relations in part as a way to compare it with the current situation in Denmark. Many of them saw parallels between the American defenders of white supremacy and their own increasingly popular right-wing, anti-immigrant Danish People's Party. American race relations have become less strange.

American historians in Europe, who have always by necessity conceived of their work as comparative and transnational, have recently found a welcome audience among the growing number of their colleagues in the United States who have sought to internationalize American history. Chief among such scholars is New York University historian Thomas Bender, one of the central figures in efforts to internationalize the American past. In his contribution to Historians across Borders, Bender makes clear that American historians in Europe paved the way for such an international approach, which will allow for more transatlantic collaboration in the future. But in addition to scholarly objectives, the internationalization of American history also promises to fulfill political aims that the left-wing Bender shares with many of his colleagues in Europe: such an approach might soften how the American nation projects its power to the rest of the world. Or at the very least it might encourage Americans to quit thinking about their nation as an exceptional nation, an outmoded perspective in an era of globalization. Americans might rather, in Clifford Geertz's words, see “ourselves amongst others.”Footnote ³

I wrote the conclusion to my new book, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015), while living and teaching in Denmark. I am confident that the conclusion would have been different had I written it in Illinois, where I write this essay. One of my intellectual preoccupations while living in Denmark was thinking about why a nation like Denmark was able to successfully build a vibrant social democracy and why nothing of the sort happened in the United States. Living in Denmark made me reflect anew on Werner Sombart's canonized question: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” Or rather, “Why no social democracy?”

The history of the culture wars is mostly a history of the cultural revolution otherwise known as the “sixties” – and a history of its discontents. When new peoples laid claim to the nation, when new peoples had different ideas about the nation, the national culture fractured. It could not have been otherwise. Cultural revolution makes a common culture a very difficult proposition. And without a common culture, it is extremely hard to build the solidarity necessary for social democracy. Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that the modest American social welfare state – the New Deal state – was constructed during an era of unusual cultural stability (of the type that is much more easily won in a small homogeneous country like Denmark). Can any nation have both cultural revolution and social democracy? This question was born from my engagement with American history – from Denmark. This was my doing history across borders. But, ironically, I have only come to this realization after reading History across Borders.

Starting from the argument that “place matters,” Historians across Borders engages with the question of how scholarly location in Europe affects historical writing about the US. At first sight, it looks as if this is going to be a book about the geography of knowledge production which defines “geography” in a rather straightforward way and reduces “place” to a question of physical (national, institutional) location. But it becomes evident in the course of the collection's coauthored chapters that the academic geography of US history described here is not so straightforward, and that the geographical complexities of the concept of “place” in relation to scholarly production and reception cannot, in fact, be flattened out to the point where the term refers to little more than “locale” or “site.” “If we think of U.S. history as space,” the editors argue, “then each scholar's position in that space matters,” and – as one chapter in particular makes clear – the space of US history, within which scholars locate themselves, “should not be reduced to the notion of living and working in Warsaw or Rome” (85).

In this way, by implication at least, Historians across Borders expands its central theme from a simple “place matters” to the potentially more complex idea of “US history as space” and as a result ends up suggesting a line of argument tantalizingly adjacent to the geographical contention that place is something which happens, and that space is “not a fixable, definable, knowable, predetermined entity,” a neutral and passive container within which people are located and things happen, but rather “a practice, a doing, an event, a becoming – a material and social reality forever (re)created in the moment.”Footnote ¹ Space, in this understanding – explicit in geography and implicit in several of the essays in this collection – is something always in process, “achieving form, function, and meaning through practice.”Footnote ² Furthermore, as this view of space suggests, European historians of the US not only are positioned “in” the space of US history but are participants in its production, and Historians across Borders itself can therefore be understood not only as an analysis of the ways in which author locations, networks, distances, technology and mobility function in the production of US history, but also as an intervention into the continuing (re-)creation and reconfiguration of that academic space.

Historians across Borders is divided into four main parts. In the first, which makes a historiographical review, five coauthors explore the various commonalities and differences they identify within a shared writing position defined as European. A key point is that “location – in Europe – has indeed made (and continues to make) significant differences to the patterns and purposes of U.S. historical writing” (xiv). Part 2 goes into the nature of this impact in more detail, looking at politics in chapter 2 and institutions in chapter 3. In chapter 4, “Straddling Intellectual Worlds: Positionality and the Writing of American History,” Nicolas Barreyre, Manfred Berg, and Simon Middleton push the collection closer to current thinking in geography and spatial theory, not only by undermining the outsider–insider dichotomy which naturalizes the assumptions that US history produced outside the US “is different” (from a US norm) and needs to be “incorporated” into the US-based mainstream, but also by looking in some detail at the space-producing and border-generating practices which sustain that insider–outsider geography, such as the US tendency to use the “we” voice in writing US history, and at the problem of language in international scholarship. This analysis of spatial practices in the production of US history makes a useful addition to related work in critical geography.Footnote ³

Part 3 less evidently works along the same critical lines as it deals in turn with transnational history and diplomatic history, and finally in chapter 7 with the conceptualization of historical frameworks in relation to early American history. But the point about the complexity of academic space raised in chapter 4 is nevertheless revisited here in chapter 7 with a reminder that “the impact of location comes from multiple factors, such as local institutional constraints, academic cultures, and power relationships among academic systems” – that location, in other words, is always a matter of multiple overlapping spatial scales, systems, and dimensions, and not a simple matter of being literally here, or there. Part 4 provides an interesting example of the ways in which language draws borders in its inclusion of six single-authored chapters providing “Perspectives from Elsewhere.” In five cases, “elsewhere” means not Europe; the sixth chapter was written “from” Europe, but by an American. According to the preface, Part 4 “opens up the debate by inviting prominent scholars from a variety of other regions of the world” to add to the collection their reflections on the impact of scholarly location on the writing of history (xvii). These are scholars who are visible in Europe despite writing from elsewhere, and their visibility – their prominence – further suggest that overlapping spatial scales, networks and hierarchies are as significant as location in academic space.

Despite the fact that the unifying theme throughout Historians across Borders is that “place matters” in the writing of history, with place generally understood as location, and location generally defined quite literally (“in Europe”), there are, then, gestures toward a more relative scholarly positionality – with chapter 4, for example, suggesting that scholarly location can be understood as “the place that a historian holds in relation to not only particular audiences and intellectual milieus but also their linguistic, professional, and institutional contexts” (79). And despite the overall emphasis on writing, this chapter also specifically proposes a relational view of academic space in which audiences matter and reading is another significant space-producing practice. The coauthors of this chapter on positionality identify four main audiences for writing on US history produced by scholars in Europe: professional historians of the US (mainly located in the US), historians in the author's home country, the general public in the home country, and the general public in the US. But as the chapter suggests, relational academic space is more unruly than this, and precisely because the space of US history is not a “fixable, definable, knowable, predetermined entity” there are also always going to be unanticipated audiences, one of the most obvious for this book being professional geographers.

This generates a paradox, because for a geographer reading across borders chapter 4 appears to be practicing an unmarked form of critical geography in its preference for “positionality” as a marker of scholarly location and its view of scholarly whereabouts as a matter of the “intersection of intellectual milieus” and not a simple matter of national academy. But its preference for the term “position” as distinct from “place” paradoxically reinforces a simpler, nonspecialist geography at the same time as it is pushing against its limits. Even as it performs its own version of geographical analysis, this chapter works from the assumption that “geographical” means “physical” or “literal,” defining positionality by contrasting a relational position with “location in a more geographical sense.” It does this despite the fact that geographers generally take it for granted that positionality and location are both relational, and that place emerges as “a constellation of processes,” an event and not a thing.Footnote ⁴ As the geographer Doreen Massey puts it, “entities and identities (be they places, or political constituencies, or mountains) are collectively produced through practices which form relations.”Footnote ⁵ This is precisely why the insider–outsider dichotomy, which is both reproduced and undermined throughout Historians across Borders, is open to reconsideration.

The essays in Historians across Borders, written for historians, dock well with ongoing work on the critical analysis of knowledge production within geography, where the problem of US/UK hegemony and the dominance of the English language has been examined in considerable detail.Footnote ⁶ A special themed issue of the journal Geoforum from 2004, for example, focussed on precisely this topic, raising many of the issues explored in Historians across Borders but in relation to the practice of geography: in her introduction Maria-Dolors Garcia-Ramon argues that “Anglophone critical geography has constructed a privileged position in which it is the theoretical centre and other scholarly geographical traditions are considered peripheral and a-theoretical, having to conform to the center's theoretical framework and agenda.”Footnote ⁷ As geographer Linda Peake notes, the “placeless practices” of the centre draw “academic power lines” just as much as the placed practices of the “elsewhere.”Footnote ⁸ Without explicitly connecting to this line of work by geographers, Historians across Borders nevertheless adds a useful dimension to the ongoing debate in that field regarding geographies of knowledge production by showing clearly how the problem of a naturalized centre is even more of an issue for historians of the US than for geographers, because their academic space is so strongly shaped by what geographer Doreen Massey would call the “power geometry” generated by the overwhelming gravitational pull of a normative US core. As the essays make clear, not only does that US centre have a firm hold on theoretical frameworks, it also has been naturalized as the embodiment of the field's subject matter, it holds most of its primary sources, its academy is numerically and financially dominant, and it is the home of the privileged international language of academic exchange. No wonder US historians working outside the US feel, even more than geographers working outside the US/UK “centre,” that they are spatially defined as “different,” as “outsiders,” always writing from somewhere else.

There are strong and valuable parallels, then, between work in geography on academic spatiality and the spatial approach to historiography undertaken in this volume. But while this volume demonstrates the extent to which European historians of the US are conscious of the need to write across national and linguistic borders, there is no corresponding idea that writing – or at least reading – across disciplinary borders and engaging with work in spatial theory and critical geographies of knowledge production might enhance their project. That historians do not think of geographers as a potential audience for their work, even when that work takes a spatial approach to their own academic practice, is hardly surprising: European historians of the US would presumably be more interested in their written work being recognized and used in their own field than in any other. But as some excursions across the disciplinary border into geography might turn out to be very useful for historians looking toward further historiographical work on this emerging theme it is probably worth pointing out that while these essays can already be read productively by geographers, specialist work in geography might in return provide historians with a useful resource for this line of work. Geographers, after all, specialize in concepts of space, place, distances and proximities both relative and literal, networks, mobility and positionality.

Because the term “geography” is used almost exclusively in Historians across Borders to refer to the familiar features and commonsense categories of the physical world, the potentially useful resource of existing work in academic geography directed toward the questioning and rethinking of concepts which appear fixed and obvious in nonspecialist discourse, such as “place,” “space,” “location” and “distance,” is not brought into play. This is despite the fact that the practical implication of much of Historians across Borders is that geography is not just a given framework and that the “geo” we experience is always already something “graphed,” written, socially and culturally produced. And as geographer Matt Sparke puts it, the

For historians interested in developing the spatial approach to historiography explored in Historians across Borders, awareness of relevant work in critical geography might turn out to be helpful. First, this work might add context, and indeed some form of solidarity. European historians finding themselves positioned as “outsiders” in the field of US history share common ground and common concerns with geographers working outside the US/UK centre: off-centre in the field of US history, they are nonetheless working in the mainstream of critical geography. Existing work in critical geography will also corroborate many of the speculative ideas about academic space proposed in this volume. To take one example: remarking that “our sense is that not all American historians of the United States have the same configuration of audiences,” one authorial collective surmises that scholars teaching in Ivy League institutions will be working within quite a different academic space to those working at other kinds of university and suggest that European historians should also be thinking about the positionality of American scholars (90). This is a theme explored in detail by geographers Karen Morin and Tamar Rothenberg in their article on hierarchies of place and status in the US academy.Footnote ¹⁰

Second, because much of the point of spatial theory and critical geography is to think outside the geo-graphing box of fixed spatial categories, these fields have the potential to offer historians useful new vocabulary and conceptual frameworks that would allow for concise and unambiguous ways of expressing emergent spatial approaches to historiography. At present there is some tension in this volume between the emphasis on the impact of place on the writing and teaching of history, on the one hand, and the acknowledgment that geography is more complicated than is allowed for in a reductive stress on place-as-location, on the other. The incorporation of a more theoretically informed definition of “place” would go a long way to resolving this tension, but this will depend on a willingness to see “geography” as a field of knowledge as well as an environmental given.

Were the idea of “US history as space” raised in this volume to be developed, and the details of the ways in which “place matters” in the writing of history to be further explored, then work such as Linda Peake's on the critical geography of knowledge production in social geography (for example) might be very helpful, because while Peake acknowledges the significance of location to the way in which knowledge “has developed in situ” she also shows how a view of social space “defined not by its boundaries but by the flows that take place through it” can generate retheorizations of academic practice. She points, for example, to the way in which shifts in the conceptualization of social space within social geography have been “partnered by transformations taking place in its institutional structures,” with British social geography moving beyond “nationally ‘circumscribed traditions of geographical research’ with the formation of cross-national teams of researchers working across sub-disciplinary and disciplinary boundaries and publishing in a wide range of non-British-based journals.”Footnote ¹¹

Third, cross-disciplinary connections with specialist geography might be empowering in practical ways for US historians working outside the US. Much of the emphasis in Historians across Borders is on the idea that European scholars need to have their work “incorporated” into the centre, with non-US-based scholars worrying about how or even whether the work of “foreign scholars” can make a contribution to the field. But as geographer Manuel Aalbers has argued, in the context of US/UK hegemony in geography, “almost all of us are, in some way or another, in between,” and “no geographical location is only normal or exotic.”Footnote ¹² While the current taken-for-granted academic spatiality of US history seems to characterize the positionality of European scholars in terms of some kind of lack, which needs to be filled by a second-language fluency, a comparative perspective, or some other way to put a positive spin on the ways in which they differ from US-based scholars, an alternative view of that academic space could locate all historians in a complex multi-scaled, multicentered space. Geographer James Sidaway usefully argues that while comparative histories “bear the marks of particular places, moments, movements and powers,” it is nonetheless possible to move beyond comparison towards what historian and sociologist Radhika V. Monghia has described as “analytical approaches that travel the globe, not in search of comparison, but to trace the genealogies of co-production.”Footnote ¹³ Difference could, as a result, be understood in terms of relations-between rather than as variations from a norm: “difference not as that which is set apart but as that which is constituted through ourselves and others.”Footnote ¹⁴ Writing on the geography of cities, Jennifer Robinson “adopts a perspective which views all cities as unique combinations of social, political, and economic configurations – which sees all cities as ‘ordinary’, and which resists attempts to determine hierarchical relations.”Footnote ¹⁵ Perhaps this line of thinking in urban geography can suggest an alternative to the conventional insider/outsider power geometry of US history, because, as Robinson suggests elsewhere, it is important not to lose sight of “the provincial nature of hegemonic knowledges.”Footnote ¹⁶

For readers coming to Historians across Borders from an academic position aligned more with geography than with history, one of its most interesting but at the same time confusing points is that while it seems to be practicing a form of critical geography, its references to “geography” and “geographical” typically refer to environmental or geopolitical location as opposed to the more complex ways of understanding space that characterize contemporary academic geography. The unfortunate result is that this emphasis on commonsense geographical features, concepts and categories will have the effect of limiting the potential of the spatial approach to historiography initiated here, and probably the so-called spatial turn in history more generally. Writing in chapter 7 on the theme of location and the spatial framing of work in early American history, for example, Trevor Burnard and Cécile Vidal express their concerns about the usefulness of the spatial turn in historical writing. “If geography is merely to replace society or culture as an unthinking category of analysis,” they argue, “we are not moving as far forward as we might suppose” (154). The paradox here is that the implication of this collection as a whole and its spatial approach to historiography is that “geography” does not have to be “an unthinking category” at all.