A British American Voice: Exploring the Transatlantic Connections in American History in Britain

Year 2006, Issue: 24, 55 - 69, 01.10.2006

Inge Dornan

Abstract

Recent calls to internationalize American history have prompted American history scholars outside the United States to evaluate how their own particular experiences might contribute to this new historiographic framework Vaudagna; Adams; Kroes . My own reflections on the usefulness of this approach to British Americanist scholars and students have encouraged a reconsideration of why and how American history came to be established in Britain’s schools and universities.1 The introduction of American history to the United Kingdom was itself a transatlantic and international enterprise. It was inspired by Britain and America’s shared past as well as present history and a mixture of public, scholarly and political affirmations of a warm and cordial Anglo American relationship. Its emergence was also inseparable from the need in Britain to craft a new identity in the wake of World War II and the demise of its Empire, and the need in America to project and defend its new superpower status abroad in a Cold War climate.

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