NB: I haven’t read either reading particularly carefully as of yet, so I may disclaim the opinions expressed here in class tomorrow.
When I was in high school I did an American history course (which might have been odd given that I’ve never lived in the United States, though I am close enough to the US-Canadian border that I can pick up television signals from Buffalo), and one of the important notions that my history teacher stressed about the earliest settlers who landed in Plymouth, and to a lesser extent the men who would spark the American Revolution, were very much motivated by the idea that this new country could be the archetypal ‘city upon a hill’ which Jesus describes in his Sermon on the Mount. That is, America is fundamentally different from everything that has gone before it and will come after it, and should be taken as a shining example of purity and goodness, as opposed to the corrupt and wicked European states from which the United States sought to distance itself. The ‘City upon a hill’ has become a byword for American exceptionalism, as well as isolationism, ever since.
Early American relationships with its neighbours could often be fraught. It invaded British North America, the territory that would become Canada, twice (though it would obviously experience a sea-change in its relations with Britain throughout the twentieth century) and frequently warned European nations to stay out of the Western hemisphere, though that apparently did not preclude the Americans from interfering in the affairs of other nations, as with the invasions of Haiti and the Spanish-American War over the Philippines. The United States also experienced a period of insularity and isolationism after the First World War, though Woodrow Wilson’s influence on the League of Nations (and to a lesser extent, its successor, the United Nations) cannot be understated. Despite the foot-dragging on the part of the US in getting into the Second World War, the Churchill-Roosevelt alliance forged from 1939-1944 would significantly influence the course of the war and fundamentally alter the way that the United States saw itself – it was now a great power, almost in the European mold, and had a chance to further influence integrate itself into a new world order.
All this is to say, in a rather roundabout way, is that the United States, despite disclaiming relations with other foreign powers and perhaps pretending that it can remove itself from the wider world, is part of a complex nexus of transnational networks. Despite (more in its early days than now, I suspect) attempting to set itself apart from the world and be that ‘city upon a hill’ above the moral morass and filth, the history of the United States can be defined as much by its transnational influences as well as its national ones. This is the point that Tyrrell is trying to make, that American national history can be complemented by examining transnational connections, and is an important lesson in how transnational history can complement national histories.
Tyrell, Ian, Transnational Nation, United States History in Global Perspective since 1789, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), Intro, chapters 1, 3, and 4.
Nice, as you (along with reading Tyrrell) pick up (at least implicitly) where we left last week with a number of loose ends, among them the question on how the “trans” relates to “national”. You conclude that they complement each other. In that respect one could take the composite “transnational history” apart and hierarchise it: placing “nation” first, with “trans” coming second as an additional layer or “way of seeing” in the making of a nation or nation state.
Is transnational history then a “chicken or egg” question of what comes first? What are other ways of explaining the making of nations (if not transnationally, through external link, and influences)? Do we need the nation first that (then, second) can, if it wishes so, can act transnationally? This is partially how I read your post. More tomorrow?
Your posting reminded me of a chapter in the oxford history of the United States volume on the early republic (Empire of Liberty) which tied some of the imagery of the United States to its fascinating with classical images and symbols but also Christian ones, such as the city on the hill. Powerful phrases and symbolic images also travel but interesting to see how they change. I recall one Korean PhD student in Japan working on a history of the phrase 良妻賢母 (good wife, wise mother) and its equivalents in China and Korea which is at once a story of a shared culture, but also differences within each of these cultures in how the images here were deployed differently and meant different thing. Also, it is at once patriarchal, but on the other hand, its rise signalled a new “national” importance for the domestic sphere, arguably increasing the domain of activity for women over that which came before it. In other words both transnational and not as simple as it looks at first glance.