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New York Times Book review editor Barry Gewen’s “Forget the Founding Fathers” is an absolute must-read, and not just because it lauds my mentor Alonzo Hamby’s eminently laudable For the Survival of Democracy.

I am inclined to be sympathetic to an essay espousing an international context for American history – broadly writ, my work is on race, politics, and social movements in the United States and Africa, with interests in global terrorism (an interest that itself stems from my American and Southern African work) and sports (because sports are awesome). But I’d like to believe that I endorse many of Gewen’s arguments because they reflect ideas I have long had. One of the most exciting trends, for example, in American and African history is one that is not really diplomatic history, and it not comparative, per se, but rather addresses what can best be called “transnational history.” Some of the best works by Thomas Borstelmann and Mary Dudziak and Francis Njubi Nesbitt and James Meriwether and Brenda Gayle Plummer and Penny von Eschen and Lewis Baldwin (with whom I am engaged in a spirited exchange in the wonderful Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies-- the latest installment can be found here) and others too numerous to mention take this tack. These authors explore connections and linkages between societies and cultures, such as the impact of the Cold War on the Civil Rights Movement, the role of African Americans in the anti-apartheid struggle, and the interrelations between Africans and American blacks. Combine this with the explicitly comparative work of the incomparable George Frederickson, and suddenly we have a new trend in the historical profession that is worth embracing, unlike much of the faddish, naval-gazing obscurantism that has passed for recent historiographical eruptions.

Gewen’s essay is wide-ranging, but it has a central focus on the internationalization of that seemingly most American of subfields: The Founding Generation. The essay goes in unexpected directions and really speaks to trends that more historians are likely to pursue in the years to come.

Posted on Saturday, June 4, 2005 at 4:59 PM | Comments (17) | Return

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