Globalizing the U.S. Survey-Course
Textbook: Challenges, Choices, and
Opportunities
Carl J. Guarneri
In recent years, the path between scholarship and teaching has been dramatically different for U.S. and world history. Public and professional demand for a globally encompassing world history survey preceded most of the scholarly works that provided its themes.
By contrast, scholars have been “internationalizing” U.S. history for more than two decades without substantially changing the introductory college-level U.S. course. Conflict
over the civic agenda of U.S. history instruction provides one explanation for the gap:
scholars may have declared American exceptionalism dead, but it is alive and well among
students, parents, state textbook approval boards, and influential conservatives, some
of whom interpret internationalization as a campaign to undermine national pride and
demote the United States to “just another nation.” Institutional inertia in multiple forms,
including curricula compartmentalized into U.S. and world silos and the absence of rewards for innovation in survey teaching, also inhibits the globalizing trajectory. Added
to these obstacles are theoretical qualms and practical challenges that interrogate the why
and how of the internationalizing project. Some historians warn that globalizing American history mistakenly de-emphasizes the nation-state, which retains enormous political
power, and abandons the quest for a unifying national narrative; others worry that globally framed history will discourage local political activism. Meanwhile, history teachers
hard-pressed to cover key elements of domestic history wonder how they can find time to
emphasize U.S.-world connections.1
Despite these challenges, there are indications that the spatial and temporal boundaries of U.S. survey courses are enlarging, although less rapidly and thoroughly than were
envisioned in a founding document of the internationalizing push, the Organization of
American Historians La Pietra Report (2000), which argued forcefully that American history should be globally contextualized and connected. As younger authors engaged in
transnational scholarship join author teams to revise older texts, increased global content
Carl J. Guarneri is a professor of history at Saint Mary’s College of California. He thanks the coauthors of Global
Americans for their suggestions and for reviewing this essay so that it accurately reflects the group’s experience.
Readers may contact Guarneri at [email protected].
1
David A. Hollinger, “The Historian’s Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in Rethinking American History
in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley, 2002), 381–95; Michael Kazin, “The Vogue of Transnationalism,”
Raritan, 26 (Winter 2007), 155–67; Johann N. Neem, “American History in a Global Age,” History and Theory, 50
(Feb. 2011), 41–70; Deborah Cunningham, “Internationalizing the K–12 U.S. History Curriculum,” Re:Source,
17 (Winter 2005), 1, 5, 11.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaw507
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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appears in lists of “what’s new in this edition.” At the community-college level, instructors who teach both world and U.S. history surveys have suggested ways to cross-fertilize them. The recently revised framework for the Advanced Placement (ap) U.S. history
course includes “America in the world” as one of its seven “thematic learning objectives,”
calling for greater attention to “the global context in which the United States originated
and developed as well as the influence of the United States on world affairs.” These factors
and others have built momentum to enlarge the narrative in U.S. history surveys. The
demand is growing for globalized U.S. history syllabi and course materials, although instructors eager to recast their courses are still faced with a shortage of full-sized textbooks
that feature a global approach.2
More than a decade ago I surveyed these trends and suggested templates for globalizing the U.S. survey. Two strategies I described—the “genetic” model and the foreign relations model—have materialized as textbooks extended their narratives of early and recent
American history. The space devoted to early American history has grown noticeably due
to increased coverage of North American native peoples, fuller treatment of the global
reach of European exploration, description of the collision of Europeans, Africans, and
Native Americans, and adoption of an Atlantic framework for colonial and revolutionaryera history. At the other chronological end, textbooks are devoting more twentieth-century coverage to U.S. involvement and influence abroad, not just in wars and governmental
relations but also in social, political, and technological arenas.3
Other changes I advocated have yet to happen. Conventional textbooks tend to adopt
an hourglass-shaped spatial framing of American history—one that begins broadly with
global and hemispheric contexts, then narrows to a purely national focus after the Revolution, and only starts in 1898 to move outward again beyond the nation’s borders. Wider,
internationalized coverage of the nineteenth century has not substantially materialized.
The story of internal U.S. nation building still dominates textual narratives and book
titles: the nation remains overwhelmingly the subject, not just the site, of the trends and
events included in these books. Nor has the periodization of U.S. history in survey texts
been adjusted to reflect longer time spans or mirror corresponding eras in world history—
a strategy elaborated on in a recent American Historical Association guide to reimagining the U.S. survey. Textbooks and the expectations that govern them remain attached to
short-term chronological coverage, presidential administrations, and one chapter for each
week of a thirteen-to-fifteen-week semester.4
2
Organization of American Historians, New York University Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History, Thomas Bender, director, La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession (New York, 2000), http://www
.oah.org/about/reports/reports-statements/the-lapietra-report-a-report-to-the-profession/; ap United States History: Course and Exam Description, Updated Fall 2015 (New York, 2015), https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/­
digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-us-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf. The quotation is from the fall 2014 edition,
page 25. For guidance about globalized survey-course topics, themes, and methods, see Bender, ed., Rethinking
American History in a Global Age; Gary W. Reichard and Ted Dickson, eds., America on the World Stage: A Global
Approach to U.S. History (Urbana, 2008); Peter N. Stearns and Noralee Frankel, eds., Globalizing American History: The aha Guide to Re-imagining the U.S. Survey Course (Washington, 2008); Carl Guarneri and James Davis,
eds., Teaching American History in a Global Context (Armonk, 2008); and “ap United States History Course Home
Page,” College Board: ap Central, http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/232395
.html#anchor4. The Reichard and Dickson, and Guarneri and Davis collections include ideas and lesson plans from
Advanced Placement and community college instructors.
3
Carl J. Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,”
History Teacher, 36 (Nov. 2002), 37–64.
4
Ibid., 41–42; John R. Gillis, “What Will It Take to Globalize American History?,” in Globalizing American
History, ed. Stearns and Frankel, 99–107. On the same spatial framing dynamic in world history textbooks, see
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These conventions suggest that the dichotomy I posited between “systemic” and “episodic” models of internationalization remains relevant. Given the constraints operating
on textbook authors, it is not surprising that recent attempts to internationalize narratives
have not taken the form of systematically rethinking their presentation but intermittently
injecting global contexts and side glances into the treatment of conventional topics. In
discussing the abolitionist movement or the New Deal, for example, textbook authors
have chosen to work “inside-out” by offering larger framing contexts or discussing overseas parallels in the course of examining specific U.S. movements or events. This method
has been a preferred alternative to an “outside-in” approach that reorganizes periodization
along world history lines or describes larger global processes before funneling down to
U.S. developments as illustrative examples.
In practice, the most common nod to transnational history occurs in boxed features
separated from the chapter narrative. New editions of familiar texts offer supplementary
features under rubrics such as “Beyond America,” “Links to the World,” and “America
Compared.” This reprises the career of social history’s entrance into textbooks in the
1970s: boxed features or similar add-ons served as an initial stage prior to social history’s
organic integration into chapter narratives, or before the development of texts designed to
elevate social history topics to parity with political narratives. A rueful joke at the time labeled it the “add-women-and-stir” approach, since at first the new ingredient functioned
more as spice than as a core ingredient.5
In the past decade I and five coauthors (Maria Montoya as the lead author, with Laura
Belmonte, Steven Hackel, Ellen Hartigan O’Connor, and Lon Kurashige) collaborated
on a full-size internationalized textbook, Global Americans. Keeping in mind the trends
I have noted, the reflections that follow highlight issues we debated, challenges we faced,
and choices we made in developing our text. Discussing these can, I hope, illuminate
larger issues involved in globalizing U.S. history textbooks as well as highlight the opportunities this initiative presents to enrich the survey.6
After experimenting with various chapter outlines, the authors and publisher—citing
constraints imposed on the survey course by current college teacher practices, ap U.S.
history guidelines, and other textbooks—agreed to a reformist rather than revolutionary
approach. That is, we would write a twenty-eight-chapter, two-volume text that “split” at
Reconstruction. We would mark all presidential elections and include influential political
and social movements, congressional legislation, and landmark Supreme Court cases. The
authors were determined not to let a global approach sacrifice depth to breadth or squeeze
out topics that we considered core or those deemed essential by teachers and accreditors. The challenges of a zero-sum game are inherent to textbook writing but especially
daunting for a globalized text, which potentially pits “structure” versus “event” history,
and international versus domestic events, in a contest for inclusion. One measure of our
Carl Guarneri, “Integrating American History before the 20th Century into the World History Curriculum,” Social Studies Review, 49 (Spring–Summer 2010), 63–68. An alternative approach to traditional textbooks is offered
by brief overviews that have been used as survey-course texts or supplements. See, for example, Thomas Bender, A
Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United
States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, 2007); Carl Guarneri, America in the World: United
States History in Global Context (New York, 2007); and Lawrence A. Peskin and Edmund F. Wehrle, America and the
World: Culture, Commerce, Conflict (Baltimore, 2012).
5
Paul S. Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Boston, 2013); Mary Beth Norton
et al., A People and a Nation (Boston, 2014); James A. Henretta et al., America’s History (New York, 2014).
6
Maria Montoya et al., Global Americans: A History of the United States (Boston, 2017).
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c­ ommitment to a detailed narrative is the approximately forty key terms per chapter that
are highlighted in the text and described in the margins. (In a break with conventional
U.S. history textbook practice, we included specialized terms relating to world events that
affected Americans, such as the Revolutions of 1848 and Blitzkrieg.) The idea was not to
reduce the number of domestic events in the narrative but to resituate many of them in
a globally connected frame. Thus, for example, the episodic economic jolts of the early
nineteenth century are treated not simply as U.S. developments but seen in relation to the
global spread of commodity trade and wage labor capitalism.
To reframe American history at the outset and to instill the habit in students’ minds,
we provided global context for each chapter in its introductory paragraphs. Each person
highlighted in a chapter’s opening vignette was selected because he or she “crossed borders”—geographically, over national boundaries, or between cultures. Each vignette culminates in a paragraph or two that places the chapter’s key themes in an internationalized
context. Chapter summaries also typically work outward from narrative details to larger
trends or wider settings of the topic. (This kind of chapter bookending is a particular
strength of another globalized text, American Horizons.)7
Our authors also shared the conviction that international topics and themes needed to
be “baked into” our narrative, not simply inserted as chapter-framing devices or added as
boxed features. In my survey-course reader, America Compared, I suggest four “c-words”
that can guide historians (and their students) to ways that U.S. history can move consistently outward toward larger themes and interpretive frameworks. First, and most obviously, there is pulling back to broad international contexts to better understand what first
appear to internal, domestic developments, such as westward conquest or progressivism.
Second, there are comparisons between different national experiences or analogous developments, such as slave emancipation, civil war, or the Great Depression. Third, transnational connections—flows of technology, goods, people, and ideas—illustrate how North
American borders have been porous and the nation’s development has been influenced by
events elsewhere. Fourth, similarities and exchanges among societies stimulate discussion
of transnational concepts: theories or models that attempt to describe empires, revolutions,
settler societies, industrialization, or feminism, against which an American variant can be
gauged. Our authors added a fifth “c-word” to this list, consequences, as we traced the impact of American economic developments (the cotton boom, Henry Ford’s assembly line)
and the expanding reach of U.S. foreign policy on the rest of the world. In keeping with
recent scholarship, we enlarged the notion of foreign relations to include “people’s diplomacy,” nongovernmental organizations, trade, and cultural exchanges.8
These “five c’s” became our mantra as we reviewed each other’s chapters and offered
suggestions for keeping the global constantly in view. We decided not to include them as a
mnemonic device for students to memorize, which might make the text overly schematic
or didactic. Instead, we introduced them in the front matter, reminded students to use
them to interrogate chapter timelines, and kept them in mind as we built our narrative.
The last task proved easier to agree on than to implement in detail. Our idea was to
weave the “five c’s” into our textual narrative integrally and persuasively. But how many
such passages should we include? How much of a chapter’s content should be global? Too
Michael Schaller et al., American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context (New York, 2013).
Carl J. Guarneri, America Compared: American History in International Perspective, vol. I: To 1877 (Boston,
2005), x–xi.
7
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little would fail to embody our aims; too many might distract or overwhelm students in
a U.S. history course. In practice, rather than mandate global coverage in a certain number of chapter sections, we took an opportunistic approach, weaving in transnational
comparisons or connections when we felt they were illuminating and devoting entire sections to them when they seemed essential. As we exchanged chapter drafts we suggested
such opportunities to one another and acted as informal referees, commenting on whether they were germane, clear, and compelling. Given the “hourglass” pattern mentioned
above, especially in the conventionally insular period between the Monroe Doctrine and
the Spanish-American War, we worked hard to place topics ranging from Indian removal
and secession to emancipation and sharecropping in global perspective. Our one rule of
thumb was that between a quarter and a third of events in chapter timelines must take
place outside British North America. Because these events were required to be discussed
in the chapter text, they served as a spur to globalizing the narrative.
All along, however, we felt the countervailing pull of the local, the need to burrow as
well as balloon. As our discussions and revisions proceeded, we expressed concern that relatively distant, global-level treatment of groups and movements might result in homogenizing the diverse social history of regions, the wide variety of gender and racial norms, or
the vast mosaic of ethnic communities within the borders of North America. We shared
the conviction that the social history revolution in textbooks ought to reach for a new
stage of sophistication, one that included testimony not only from multiple groups but
also from different voices within those groups.
Thus, we developed “complex diversity” as an additional signature approach. Our narratives would acknowledge multiple perspectives within groups bound by race, ethnicity,
class, and gender. To integrate with our global approach, they might also show how that
diversity expressed itself through contact with transnational forces such as social movements, trade, or migration. Thus, for example, when discussing the diffusion of European
consumer goods in the eighteenth century, we present the very different impact it had
on the lives and the politicization of free white women, enslaved women, and Cherokee
women. Finding a happy medium between clarity and complexity was not easy, but we
sought to highlight especially important instances of coalition or disagreement, such as
Indian societies during the Civil War, African American strategies in the civil rights era, or
debates over ideologies of feminism and gender. We had no set rule, but one useful gauge
of when to invoke “complex diversity” was the list of “throughlines” or major topics we
agreed to thread through the text, which included empire and colonialism, nationalism,
migration, race and ethnicity, family and gender, class and labor systems, religion, and
changing notions of equality and rights. Each of these topics seemed to require the careful
parsing appropriate for introducing undergraduates to sophisticated historical analysis. In
the end, our textbook’s narrative reflects a series of decisions, often taken after long discussions about throughlines as well as the need to standardize our terminology, to carry
forward themes introduced in earlier chapters, or to set the stage for events discussed later
in the text.
Having agreed on global emphasis and “complex diversity” as guiding aims, we set to
work. Like others who place the United States in global context, we faced the question of
how to narrate the beginnings of American history. In recent texts the old starting points,
Jamestown and Plymouth, have justly given way to the prior history of Spanish and
Portuguese colonization. But if these are seen as a product of centuries-long European
988
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e­ xpansion, European trade with Asia and the African slave trade become viable starting
points for chronicling how the three worlds of Europe, Africa, and the Americas collided.
Several current popular textbooks open with a vignette of the European-native encounter, then cut to the back stories describing how disparate societal trajectories intersected.
Although we include much of this deep history, we chose to begin differently. Perhaps
paradoxically for a globalized text, our narrative begins in North America and it devotes
its initial chapter entirely to the first American peoples. We were unwilling to reduce the
long and rich precontact history of Native Americans to a brief back story to European
colonization. We also decided that Native American history could begin shaping our narrative as a series of migrations and claims to North American territory that would play
out with a similar process among Europeans. Although Indian peoples did not organize
nation-states along European lines, some built empires and the rest can be viewed as distinctive enough polities and societies for their exchanges and collisions, especially with
Europeans, to be described as “international.” In other words, their full story is integral,
not incidental, to a globalized American history.
If one benefit of a place-based approach was to establish the theme of North America
as contested space, another was to avoid the common treatment of native and colonial
history as simply a prelude to U.S. nationhood. To be sure, we needed to acknowledge
the implicit bow to this teleology in the progression by which virtually all U.S. history
textbooks gradually zoom in on the lands that eventually became the United States. But
we attempted to keep all of North America in view throughout our text and remained
convinced that both Native American and colonial history are best approached by examining the full range of peoples and of colonial projects for trade and settlement, not just
those that prevailed or endured. The contingency of such projects became a key theme
as we situated them in their time and we denaturalized historical change. A positive potential effect of globalizing American history is to portray nationhood as a contingent,
not-inevitable process. Our text adopts this view by showing how, after independence,
U.S. nation building began a century-long process of conflict and experiment. Chapters
that cover state and national constitutions, debates over participation in the new Republic, and westward expansion are explicitly cast as narratives of experiment, invention, and
contestation, forged in contact with international forces and culminating in an epochal
civil war.9
Quite by coincidence, four of the authors are California-based historians, and this
reinforced what we came to call our “continental orientation.” We worked to integrate
the trans-Mississippi West, California, and Hawaii in every period of the national story,
and included more coverage of Mexico and Canada than any textbook we are aware of.
Our continental reach prompted us to question the traditional east-to-west narrative of
American history by toggling back and forth among inland groups rather than including
them only when East Coast whites encountered them. In practice, this approach proved
difficult at times to mesh seamlessly with the narrative of U.S. westward conquest and
incorporation, but we worked hard to begin that story by portraying frontiers as borderlands, describing societies on the “other side” before collision, and keeping multiple perspectives in view.
9
On nationhood as a contingent process, see Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of
Narratives,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Bender, 1–21.
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989
A continental orientation involved other accommodations and trade-offs, too. Most
notably, we found that it tended to delay our discussion of global developments such as
European expansion and the Atlantic slave trade until they impinged on North America.
Revisions of early drafts went a long way toward correcting this tendency by including
introductory material on Europe, Africa, and the Americas prior to 1585 and by opening
our treatment of slavery in its African and Caribbean contexts. Still, whether narratives
of specific topics proceeded “outside in” from global to American events, or “inside out,”
they alerted us to an inherent tug between the demands of national history and transnational history.10 The first centers on a place, people, or nation; the second takes regional
or global circuits of institutions, people, goods, or ideas as its prime subject. U.S. history
textbooks are inescapably national, but our plan was to supplement and enrich their approach by following the “five c’s” that led us to global perspectives. Transnational or global
frameworks such as Atlantic history, the Pacific Rim, the Columbian exchange, the history of empires, and the Age of Revolution could not dictate our approach, but they repeatedly shaped our presentation. Such an “episodic” strategy put a premium on finding
ways to keep events and developments beyond national borders in view, and we worked
hard to integrate them frequently and smoothly.
If in the first volume of Global Americans we tugged against an inward geographic pull
and resisted reducing our narrative to domestic nation building, in the second we faced
the problem of incorporating the outward push of U.S. history without losing our focus
on North America and “complex diversity.” How could we describe the growing global reach of the United States without neglecting the “homeland” or homogenizing the
American people?
In retrospect, and no doubt with greater coherence as our writing progressed, we centered our response on three approaches. One was to shift the earlier notion of America as
“contested space” from the geographical to the ideological; that is, to move from the Civil
War, Indian wars, and other domestic boundary disputes to political and social contests
over the nation’s future: the scope of federal power, the treatment of women and minorities, and debates over immigration. Concurrently, the “contested ground” of U.S. history increasingly referred to commitments that the government and private citizens made
abroad: an overseas empire, participation in two world wars, leadership of the Cold War,
and involvements in the Middle East. Committed to a global, multiperspective approach,
we attempted to cover not simply the domestic debates over these events but also the reactions of people abroad affected by them.
A third, related strategy stressed connections between domestic and foreign affairs,
keeping in mind not only U.S. foreign policy but also transnational contacts of many
kinds. In one direction we discuss how American technology, civil rights struggles, and
consumer goods influenced ways of life globally. In the other, we trace how events overseas influenced the American home front during wars, the domestic ramifications of the
Cold War, the impact of Third World ideologies in the 1960s, and America’s response to
global recession in the 1970s.
By breaking down the period between 1945 and 1975 into three concurrent topical
chapters, we found our text was better positioned to flesh out the influence of the Cold
10
Jay Sexton, “The Global View of the United States,” Historical Journal, 48 (March 2005), 261–76; Ian Tyrrell,
“Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History, 4
(no. 3, 2009), 453–74; Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke, 2013).
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War on social and economic issues within the United States and around the world. In
fact, adopting similar large-scale organizing themes became in our chapters on the recent
past a way to avoid falling back on the “presidential synthesis,” as several current texts
do. By pursuing the themes of collapse, conservative resurgence, and polarization, these
chapters provide a longer-span periodization and offer multiple opportunities to connect
foreign wars, transatlantic ideological shifts, and increasing global economic inequality to
the American story.
Although our main intent was to weave global perspectives into the narrative, we decided to include two boxed features to enhance the approach. The first, a two-page spread
called “History without Borders,” traced commodities and ideas that circulated globally,
whether originating in North America or having an important influence there. Examples
include chocolate, paper money, secession, baseball, communism, eugenics, nuclear testing, and same-sex marriage. These capsule narratives engage readers with histories of familiar concepts and everyday commodities, and they document connections between the
local and the global. Newly developed hemispheric and global maps for this feature direct
students’ attention to places whose innovations influenced U.S. history or that spread
North American cultures abroad.
A second feature, capsule biographies of “Global Americans” scattered through each
chapter, defamiliarizes well-known Americans and resurrects obscure ones by stressing
their border-crossing activities and, in some cases, greater renown overseas. Examples of
little-known “Global Americans” include Samson Occom, a Mohegan convert of the
Great Awakening who preached in Great Britain; Sarah Mar’gru Kinson, who survived
the 1839 Amistad mutiny, was educated at Oberlin College, and returned to West Africa as a mission schoolteacher; Leonidas Skliris, a Greek American labor recruiter for
the Utah mines; and Yung Wing, the first Chinese man to earn a bachelor’s degree at
Yale College (1854). More familiar figures whose lives somewhat surprisingly spanned
borders include Daniel Boone, the American frontier folk hero who was charged with
treason for negotiating with the Shawnee and British during the Revolution and ended
his career as a Spanish official in the trans-Mississippi West, Thurgood Marshall, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attorney and Supreme Court
justice who traveled to Kenya to draft the new nation’s Bill of Rights, and (more whimsically) Barbie, the buxom doll introduced in 1959 who was modeled on a sexy adult toy
in Germany and soon became revered and reviled worldwide. World history narratives
sometimes neglect the human element in favor of charting large-scale, impersonal forces.
These sixty-nine portraits of “Global Americans” keep our book’s focus on persons—or
in Barbie’s case, a replica of one. Recognizing that accounts of transnational lives typically privilege people of means and mobility, we researched avidly to include biographies of
diverse, ordinary Americans who participated in transnational events and cross-cultural
exchanges.
Last but not least, we envisioned supplementary learning features in each chapter as
sites where students could be reminded of American history’s links to larger global stories. Many of our maps and tables were adapted from world history textbooks to accentuate the global contexts of topics such as disease, migration, depressions, and industrialization as well as wars. As noted above, each chapter ends with a detailed, color-coded
timeline with events that involve places other than British North America, encouraging
students to explore mutual influences and common causes. These learning aids are sup-
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plemented by additional maps, images, and documents available in the e-book version
of the text.
Contrary to the fears historians and public commentators have expressed about American history’s “international turn,” our text is not intended to impose a unified master narrative on the American past, whether exceptionalist, triumphalist, imperial, or otherwise.
Its aim is to offer a globally informed, and thus more accurate and timely, presentation
of key events and themes in U.S. history. Global Americans should stimulate teachers and
students to situate that history in larger contexts, and it features a variety of geographic
and historical reference points for teachers and students to use in constructing their own
interpretations of the nation’s past.
My emphasis in these reflections on the hybrid nature of our undertaking and its
inevitable tradeoffs is intended to highlight the challenges historians of colonial North
American societies and the United States face in designing internationalized textbooks. I
offer them to foster discussion among teachers and to illustrate one author team’s particular interpretive and pedagogical choices. After several years of collaboration, the authors
of Global Americans have emerged more convinced than ever that shaping a globally informed history is a crucial and rewarding endeavor for introductory-course teachers and
textbook authors who focus on North America, just as for those who write world history.
Neither Global Americans nor American Horizons, another text designed along similar
lines, revolutionizes the structure or content of U.S. history textbooks. But their reformist
agenda may prove to be the best strategy at this juncture to attract teachers and students
of U.S. history to scholarship’s transnational turn. On one hand, they retain the political
and social history spine that most accreditors and many teachers consider the backbone
of survey-course coverage. On the other, by situating national history in global settings,
they may spark more fundamental rethinking of conventional narratives, and by their
telling the U.S. story amid myriad movements of people, goods, and ideas across borders,
they should resonate with the enlarging radius of Americans’ daily lives in the twenty-first
century.
APPENDIX: EXCERPTS FROM GLOBAL AMERICANS
This first excerpt, from chapter 8, “Inventing Republics in the Age of Revolutions,
1789–1819,” suggests transatlantic parallels and mutual influences as French, English,
and American women expanded the era’s rhetoric of universal rights to include women.
Some French revolutionaries pushed at the radical edge of universal rights. In 1791,
French intellectual and playwright Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, rewriting all seventeen articles
of the 1789 Declaration to explicitly include women as well as men. She insisted:
“Woman, wake up . . . the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole
universe. . . . What advantage have you received from the Revolution?” That was a
question American women asked themselves as well. In 1790, Massachusetts author
Judith Sargeant Murray published an essay entitled “On the Equality of the Sexes”
challenging prevailing ideas that women were unequal in society because of their
fundamental inferiority. Murray, like de Gouges and English author Mary Wollstonecraft, argued that men and women were born equal, but a limited education
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March 2017
debased women. “Is it reasonable,” Murray asked, that women “be allowed no other
ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of a pudding, or the sewing of the seams of a garment?” Murray and Wollstonecraft believed the solution to
the problem lay in educating girls in writing, mathematics, sciences, and languages,
not merely cooking and sewing. Only then could women realize their true potential. Their transatlantic influence encouraged the growth of private academies for
girls who could afford them and educational books for those who could not.
This second excerpt, from chapter 22, “The Cold War, 1945–1965,” not only includes
substantive information on the U.S. role in Guatemala’s 1954 coup but also describes the
consequences of U.S. Cold War policies in Latin American nations and their eventual
impact on the United States.
[During the Cold War] Latin America was more important to U.S. officials than
Africa because of its proximity to the United States and the long-standing practice
of U.S. intervention throughout the region. By the 1950s, U.S. officials sought to
keep Latin American nations dependent on the United States. . . . In 1954, when
Guatemala sought to nationalize the huge landholdings of U.S. firm United Fruit
Company, Eisenhower had the cia overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in the name of anticommunism. The coup ignored
the support of the Guatemalan people for land redistribution and the fact that
Guzmán was tied neither to communism nor to the Soviet Union. The new military
government, a U.S. ally, reclaimed United Fruit Company’s banana plantations and
ruled the nation for the next three decades. The result of U.S. dominance was the
underdevelopment of Latin American economies, a see-saw process in which rising
profits for U.S. firms (and low food costs for American consumers) led directly to
the declining economic independence of Latin American nations. Although U.S.
influence made nations in the Western Hemisphere far more economically and politically stable than newly independent nations in Africa, this stability reinforced
a huge gap between rich and poor that pushed millions to migrate to the United
States.11
11
Montoya et al., Global Americans.