Rethinking America in a Global Perspective

Syllabus

** Tentative and subject to change**

Readings to be completed prior to institute:

  • Bender, Thomas, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006)

  • Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, The Americas: A Hemispheric History (New York: Modern Library, 2003)

  • Guarneri, Carl, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” The History Teacher, 36:1 (November 2002), 37-64.


Week I - America as World Frontier to 1776

  • Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005), Chapters 4 and 8.

  • Gillis, John, Islands of the Mind:How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004, Chapter V.

  • Mancke, Elizabeth, “From Global Processes to Continental Strategies: The Emergence of British North America to 1783.”Co-authored with John G. Reid.In Canada and  the British Empire. Ed. Phillip Buckner. A volume in the The Oxford History of the British Empire series. Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

  • Kupperman, Karen, “International at the Creation: Early Modern American History,” Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 103-22.

  • DuBois, Laurent, and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804:  A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), Part One

  • Bergquist, Charles, “The Paradox of Development in the Americas,” America Compared, ed. Guarneri, vol. I, pp. 77-90.


Week II - America in Age of Nation Building, 1776-1898

  • Gould, Eliga, “A Hemisphere to Itself? Revolutionary America and the Legal Geography of the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1750-1825"

  • Eliga Gould, “Entangled Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 764–786

  • Adas, Michael, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001), 1692-1720.

  • Tyrrell, Ian, “Beyond the View from Euro-America:Environment, Settler Societies, and the Internationalization of American History, in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Bender, pp. 168-191.

  • Gabaccia, Donna, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?Nomads, Nations, and the Immigration Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1115-1134.

  • Hoerder, Dirk, “From Euro- and Afro-Atlantic to Pacific Migration System: A Comparative Migration Approach to North American History, “ in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Bender, pp. 195-235

  • Jack P Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (April 2007): 235-250, with responses by David Armitage, Eliga Gould, and Adam Rothman


Week III - Rise to Global Power, 1898-1973

  • Geyer, Michael, and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1034-1060.

  • Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, "Introduction,"The Myth of Continents, pp. 1-19.

  • Winks, Robin, “American Imperialism in Comparative Perspective,” America Compared, ed. Guarneri, vol. II, pp. 144-159

  • Kramer, Paul, "Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the  British and United States Empires, 1880-1910," Journal of American History 88 (March 2002): 1315-53.

  • Dawley, Alan, Changing the World:American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2003), Chapters 6 and 7.


Week IV - Challenges of Globalization, 1973-Present

  • Von Eschen, Penny, Satchmo Blows Up the World:Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Chapter 3 and Epilogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  • Jackson, Jeffrey, “The Meanings of American Jazz,” America Compared, ed. Guarneri, vol II, pp. 237-258

  • Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Chapters 8, 10, 12, 14-16

  • Guarneri, Carl, America in the World:United States History in Global Context (New York:McGraw-Hill, 2007), Chapter 6.

Last Updated: December 27, 2007 11:54 AM