Reviews for A nation among nations

The average rating for A nation among nations based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-18 00:00:00 Merry Steffan This is an interesting book that I'm not quite sure what to do with intellectually or pedagogically. Bender tries to reframe American history in a more global context in order to get away from distorting exceptionalist narratives. There is great value in his idea that the nation has dominated He argues that American history needs to be blended into and taught as a part of world history, which is certainly easier said than done. I'd be very interested to read his syllabi or see how he teaches his courses. The biggest problem I anticipate is that learning history this way requires a pretty solid understanding of what is going on in these individual, interconnected nations. I could see this approach working well in college, but I wouldn't know how to teach it to high schoolers. I personally like the idea of teaching world history in high school as a few very in-depth examinations of a few parts of the world, rather than an attempt to either understand big, impersonal processes (like this book does) or try to cover every society at the surface level (as many high school teachers do). Still, I must say that his reframing of American history works in a lot of interesting ways. Here's a short list of the different aspects of American history that are significantly different in this telling: exploration, slavery, the plantation, movement across the Atlantic, the American Revolution and its "contagion," the idea of peripheral rebellions against imperial cores in the late 18th century, Indian retreat/dislocation post 1763/83, early Republic foreign policy and domestic politics, nationalism, homogeneity, and civil wars, centralization, nationalism, and liberalism in the mid-19th century, the Civil War and resistance to centralization, the transition from confederated unions to consolidated nations, free labor ideology, the West as imperialism, racial superiority doctrines, industrialization and urbanization, the critique of unregulated capitalism, the fusion of economics, social issues, and politics, expanded notions of rights and freedoms, and a new view of personal responsibility. I assume that Bender stops his book in the early 20th Century because it becomes much easier at that point to envision American history as global. Bender tries as hard as he can to avoid the "Why the West Rose" question to his detriment. His integration of American history to global history are mostly integrations into European and South American history, as the Middle East, Africa, and most of Asia are left out after Chapter 1. There's no inherent problem with this, but he does seem to be avoiding the question as to why some societies histories line up in such interesting ways with the US and others don't. I would have liked to see him address this. As one of my professors put it to me, this is a thought-provoking book that is short on practical advice on how to think about or teach history differently. My best guess would be that a more thematic approach to history is what Bender wants. For example, his first chapter reconfigures the settlement of the British American colonies as one corner of a broader process of discovering the oceanic world and Europeans using that world to gain territory, resources, and power. I think it would be really hard and time consuming to teach both the detailed history of this settlement and the bigger picture. If Bender can do that in a single course, I'm impressed. I think it is more likely that he is building on and simultaneously criticizing the groundwork laid by other teachers teaching more the conventional national narratives that are the building blocks to global history.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-09 00:00:00 David Welsh 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.