Internationalizing the Study of American History
A Joint Project of the Organization of American Historians and New York University

REPORT ON CONFERENCE III

Villa La Pietra, New York University
in Florence, Italy

July 5-8, 1999

In the third of a series of four conferences, 27 historians from the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia met from July 5 to 8, 1999, at New York University's Florence Campus, Villa La Pietra. Because of the complex sponsorship of the project, the selection of participants combined invitation and competition. For the OAH Competition, the Selection Committee were Thomas Bender, representing New York University; Mike Hogan, representing the OAH as Chair of the International Committee; Linda Kerber, representing U.S.-based historians from the Planning Conference; Christiane Harzing, representing non-U.S.-based historians from the Planning Conference.

The invited participants were Tiziano Bonazzi (Italy), Nicholas Canny (Ireland), Eric Foner (US), Ferdinando Fasce (Italy), Jun Furuya (Japan), Lori Ginzberg (US), Dirk Hoerder (Germany), Rob Kroes (Netherlands), Lester Langley (US), Donna Merwick (Australia), Daniel Rodgers (US), Nayan Shah (US), Robert Wiebe (US), Francois Weil (France). (Pablo Pozzi of Argentina accepted an invitation, but later had to withdraw.)

Participants from New York University, besides Thomas Bender, were Karen Kupperman and Marilyn Young. (Tricia Rose was also to participate, but a family crisis forced her withdrawal just before the conference.) In addition, two NYU advanced graduate students participated: Michael LaCombe and Molly McGarry.

The competition sponsored by the OAH produced a substantial pool of applicants (38), and from that pool eight were selected, all based in the U.S. at the time of selection, but of whom two fit into the growing category of transnational intellectuals. The group of institutions and positions within the profession: Nancy Cott (Yale), Alan Dawley (College of New Jersey), Dana Frank (University of California, Santa Cruz), Kristin Hoganson (Harvard; now at Illinois), Yukiki Koshiro (Notre Dame; now at the Japanese Social Science Research Council, Tokyo), Carl Nightingale (Massachusetts at Amherst), Mari Hoshihara (Hawaii at Manoa). Thomas Osborne, Santa Ana College was also selected, but at the last minute was unable to travel.

The conference had two keynote speakers, both from outside of the field of American history: Jacques Revel, President of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Greg Dening, recently retired from the University of Melbourne. Both contributed enormously stimulating lectures that raised fundamental questions about boundaries, space, and the meaning of historical time.

The work of the conference, following the agenda established at the Planning Conference in 1997 (Conference I), was to examine exemplary essays seeking to reframe key themes and periods of American history. Accordingly, eleven participants were commissioned to write such papers: Wiebe on nationalism and democracy, Kupperman on the nature of the European encounter with the Americans, Foner on freedom, Hoerder on migration and immigration, Ginzberg on social movements, Kroes on the extension of American culture abroad, Shah on American forms of modernity and its implications for issues of inclusion and exclusion, Merwick on the age of colonial encounters, Langley on the age of revolution, Rodgers on the age of social politics, and Young on the age of global power. The participants selected from the OAH competition prepared working papers on related themes, which were distributed as well, and these same participants, in addition the remaining invited participants served as formal commentators, introducing the commissioned papers.

The quality of the papers was quite high, and the level of discussion matched that standard. There was, moreover, a clear sense among the participants that the discussions had a cumulative quality. The discussions focused more sharply on the craft of the individual papers than was the case in the past, largely as a result of the format (formal commentators, with the intention of editorial style commentary) and of the nature of the papers (substantive histories rather than the theoretical or advocacy papers of the earlier conferences). In general, one can say that this meeting was more concrete and less theoretical than the earlier ones.

Although there was plenty of conflict and contention over the course of the conference, it was striking that much that had invited debate in earlier conferences were not issues here. The nation, for example, was not an entity to be either dismissed or preserved; tracking transnational structures and processes (people, money, things, knowledges) seemed startlingly obvious to participants, not really debatable. That the nation was a historical construction was a premise rather than a point of discussion. The notion of an American Empire, a subject of much discussion in earlier meetings, was assimilated as a premise almost without comment. At earlier conferences there had been debates and worries about the relation of comparative and transnational approaches to American history, but at this conference they were rather easily accepted as different but complementary. There was a comfortable acceptance of the idea that there are multiple levels or scales of every history: global and local, with historically specific intermediate units.

As in the other conferences, the value of a stronger international community of scholars investigating and teaching American history was strongly affirmed, but in Conference III one could not but be struck by the especial ease of the intellectual (and social) relations among historians from the United States and those from abroad.

Conference IV will be held in the summer of 2000. Because its work is to be the writing of a report to the profession-addressing professional or institutional, research, and curricular issues raised by our sequence of meetings--the conference will be made up mainly of alumni of the previous three meetings. That said, it will be important to have some participants new to the discussion able to raise points from outside of the pattern of discussion of those meetings. Hence this conference too should be open to the OAH Competition, though the numbers selected will have to be smaller. Four seems the right number. The issues to be addressed at conference IV are, first, the prospect of an intellectually unified discipline. one of the implications of this effort at de­provincialization is the lessening of the boundaries that divide the national fields and especially Americanists from their other colleagues in our departments. The second issue is the intellectual challenge of the relations between microhistories, middle range histories (national in the old sense), and macrohistories; third, the structure of the curriculum, from K-12, to undergraduate programs, to graduate training (and perhaps postdoctoral positions). Fourth, there is the issue of the public for history. How would reframing American history affect the relation of professional history, whether academic or public, to our established audience? If we build it, will they come? Finally, it is necessary to consider the possible changes in the professional organization of American historians that would be needed to serve a partially redefined field, one in which the figure and field are brought into better balance in historical narratives.