A nation among nations Book

One might expect "A Nation Among Nations" to serve as American history with global overtones, but it would be more accurate to call it a global history that includes America. What interests Bender is the global context for iconic events in U.S. history, like the American Revolution or the Civil War. Historians, Bender argues, have constructed an exceptionalist narrative for American history that leads to attitudes that are both parochial and arrogant. US history has always been tied up in the rest of the world. The events that precipitated our revolution, for example, should properly be seen as one episode in a global fiscal crisis. States around the world were dealing with "increasing military expenditures due to greater global integration;" this was a phenomenon that caused moments of crisis in the Ottoman, French, Spanish, and of course the British empires in the eighteenth century. The American Revolution was a particularly successful moment of crisis (for Americans), but clearly the British colonists were not the only people dealing with these issues. Additionally, violence over constitutional issues was bound to flare up somewhere in the British Empire, the thirteen colonies just happened to be first. Similarly, the Civil War can be seen as one episode in a worldwide mid-nineteenth century movement toward "state centralization and…consolidation" in which states sometimes resorted to a "violent process of nation-making." There were progressive currents all over the Atlantic world at the time of the progressive movement in the USA. And of course, American expansion into the Caribbean and Pacific happened as other nations were also consolidating their overseas empires.
Bender's book is a clear call for change. The world today, he writes, demands that historians adopt "a more cosmopolitan vision." The United States is connected in complex interdependency with all the other states of the world, and it is about time that we composed histories that helped us understand and engage with this reality. I agree. The whole American exceptionalist narrative has never made much sense to me.