American history, British historians: the trans-atlantic perspective.

"What should they know of England," Rudyard Kipling famously asked, "who only England know?" In a recent U.S./U.K. collaborative volume devoted to exploring the enduring legacy of the American Civil War, Charles Joyner invoked the sentiment--and in some ways the context, given the ongoing debate over the Confederate flag--of Kipling's query when he observed that "any history studied only by insiders, or any history studied only by outsiders, is only half studied" (Joyner, "'Forget, Hell!': The Civil War in Southern Memory," in Susan-Mary Grant and Peter J. Parish, eds., Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War [Baton Rouge, 2003], 18). British academia's interest in the United States has a long history, and British scholars, as Michael J. Heale has noted, enjoy "the peculiar condition" of being "simultaneously members of two academic worlds, British and American, and have to give heed to both." In some ways, this mitigates the existence of any uniquely British approach to the study of the United States, something that Heale identified as a feature of the scholarship of the 1950s but already in decline twenty years later. It was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, he noted, that American history became popular in British universities, and initially the vast proportion of books and articles focused on "Atlantic history," with an emphasis on the "common democratic, libertarian, and cultural traditions" that the two nations shared. This approach defined the scholarship between 1945 and 1965, but since then, he suggested, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to detect any identifiable "British" angle on the subject (Heale, "American History: The View from Britain," Reviews in American History, 14 ]December 1986], 501-22 [quotations on pp. 501-2]).

The links between the British and American academic worlds have been strengthened over the years by the trans-Atlantic nature of the job market, with academics moving in both directions, but perhaps more so by the opportunities afforded by the World Wide Web. America's dominance of that medium, and more importantly the willingness of its government, its historical societies, and its various academic institutions to share substantial amounts of primary historical material through it, have transformed the research experience and opened up opportunities for scholars working on the British side of the Atlantic who may not live and work in geographic proximity to a major research library. Above all, the fact that virtually all British Americanists now seek to publish their research with American presses, which are both more committed to their subject and more professional at promoting it, makes it increasingly difficult to differentiate between an American and a British author, since both write for the same audience, in the same historiographical context, and, in light of the changes that the British academic world has undergone in the last two decades, under the same career pressures.

Although all these factors mitigate any identifiably British approach to the study of the United States, there are still distinguishing features that separate the British scholar from the American. The most obvious is that, even within the academic community, there is a far greater awareness of America in Britain than vice versa. America may not always set the agenda for research--indeed in some cases the opposite is true--but there is a perception in some quarters that in the British approach American history is studied only within a broader American Studies context or that it is narrowly focused on the South and on race relations, slavery, and civil rights predominantly. Certainly British academics research and publish in these areas and are perhaps freer to do so in some of them than is the case in America. With less of a personal or political ax to grind, non-Americans may be able to offer a fresh perspective on some subjects around which feelings run high in America itself, and that includes southern history; if the South holds a particular fascination for British academics it is certainly a fascination shared by American academics.

The second distinguishing feature is the cross-fertilization of ideas in Britain that arises from the intellectual exchange between a broader American Studies community and the historians within that community. The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) is holding its Fiftieth Anniversary Conference this year, and the remarkable range of topics covered--gender, photography, literature, foreign policy, race and the South, the Early Republic, sport, civil rights, and the West, to name but a few--offers clear evidence of the vibrancy of research in Britain on the United States. The Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) continues to thrive, and the British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BRANCH) association held its tenth-anniversary conference in Cambridge last year and in 2005 is holding its second international conference in Edgefield, South Carolina. The academic journal that grew out of BRANCH, American Nineteenth Century History, publishes work by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic interested in the "long nineteenth century" and across a range of research fields including nationalism, immigration and ethnicity, slavery, race, urban history, and economic and business history. Although under pressure, American Studies remains integral to many British universities' undergraduate and postgraduate programs, while in London the study of America has taken a new and exciting direction with the merger of the Institute of United States Studies and the Institute of Latin American Studies to form a new interdisciplinary Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA). British doctoral theses on American history--theses on topics from the Constitution to the Cold War, from environmental history to Vietnam, Lee Harvey Oswald to Robert Kennedy--completed since 2000 offer equally persuasive evidence of the broad range of interest in the United States on this side of the Atlantic. The study of the American South, specifically, will always fascinate British students and academics alike, encapsulating as it does so many of the wider issues that America has faced as a nation, but it is only a part of the transatlantic dialogue on American history, the importance of which, in the twenty-first century, cannot and should not be underestimated. [SUSAN-MARY GRANT, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne]