The Nation, Progress and European Identity in The Rise of Modern Europe

Abstract

The academic study of European history has not been the exclusive domain of the continent’s own scholars. American historians by the nineteenth century believed that understanding their own political and social heritage required a wider consideration of Europe as a single historical identity. With the emergence of the modern university system and professional academic history, Americans were challenged to fashion an integrated European consciousness that derived coherent cultural traditions for an increasingly diverse population in North America.¹ By the early twentieth century, scholars confronted the need to consider a more standard conception of European history in the curricula of higher education across the country, both for contemporary affairs and the pre-modern era, in terms that could identify with American civic attitudes.² This interpretation of Europe, however, could not mirror only domestic conceptions. By necessity scholarship would rely on foreign research that comprised fragmented national narratives and conceptions of cultural uniqueness across ethno-linguistic groupings. At the same time, European specialists were increasingly pressed to relate their research to the ‘New History’, as practised by Americanist colleagues who called for a more inclusive, interdisciplinary and present-minded examination of the country’s entire social past.³ The apocalypse of the First World War only intensified an interest among American academics to understand their country’s relation to the world through a transatlantic historical identity.⁴