National History Center

The National History Center will sponsor seven sessions at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago January 5-8. Topics range from environmental history to Scotland’s role in the British Empire to the future of the history major in liberal education. The Center will also inaugurate a new initiative, “Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting It Right,” join in the reprise of 2011’s successful workshop, “Recognizing Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching,” and host an open forum and reception welcoming all meeting participants.

“Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting Right” is a joint venture of the History Center, the AHA, and two centers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism, the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and the Norman Lear Center.  The collaboration is based on the idea that historians and journalists can learn from each other as they pursue accuracy and acuity.

“Imagine if journalists, under deadline pressure, had easy access to relevant historians in order to add depth and context to their stories,” said Martin H. Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center. “Imagine if historians who use journalism as primary source material had a more intimate understanding of how journalists craft narratives in real time.  Building bridges like that, which could help both professions, is one of the aims of this project.”

For more on the Getting It Right panels and the NHC’s other sessions, see an article on them in the December issue of the AHA’s magazine, Perspectives, at http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2011/1112/National-History-Center-at-the-Annual-Meeting.cfm.

In the last seminar of the fall semester, Thomas Bender of New York University asked whether American history is truly exceptional when seen in global context. Following World War II, he said, the dominant narrative of U.S. history posited “American exceptionalism.” That assumption shaped historical scholarship and Cold War policy. More recently a neo-conservative belief in exceptionalism has affected international and domestic history. But a global perspective reveals that our history is not “exceptional,” only distinctive. Every major moment in American history–Revolution, Civil War, Progressivism, and the New Deal, for example–is part of a larger transnational history.

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. His scholarly work has been focused on intellectual and cultural history; his most recent work, however, has been devoted to exploring the ways in which American history has been embedded in histories larger than itself, some of which are global in extent. His books include Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006).

A webcast of Bender’s seminar is available at: American Exceptionalism in Global Perspective.

The Washington History seminar is a joint venture of the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. As always, it takes place at the Wilson Center in the Ronald Reagan Building, 13th and Pennsylvania, NW, in downtown Washington, DC (Federal Triangle Metro stop).  It is supported by a gift from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Reservations are requested because of limited seating: HAPP@wilsoncenter.org.