You the people: writing American history abroad

This Project is now complete

You, the People: National Location and the Writing of American History – the Example of Europe

‘You, the People’ is an unprecedented network of European-based historians of the United States. It brings together twenty-three scholars from eleven countries to explore the effects of national location on the writing of American history, using Europe as a case study.

Thus the network will survey European historiography on the United States since 1945, considering the work of European historians up until the end of the 1980s against the backdrop of the Cold War, and since the 1990s, in the context of American academic hegemony and the internationalization of the US history project, and finally the contrasting political uses of this work on both sides of the Atlantic. The network will also reflect on the role of national institutional structures, taking into account differing teaching and working cultures, language and writing styles across European higher education. Finally, the network will consider some specific European entries into US history, analysing comparative, transatlantic and Atlantic approaches to history writing.


 

The Declaration of Independence July 4 1776 by John Trumbull.
Research Aims

The ‘You, the People’ network emerged from conversations between historians from OxCRUSH and the Centre d'Études Nord-Américaines at the Maison Française d’Oxford in 2008.

Thanks to a substantial grant from the Leverhulme Trust, a formal network was established on 1 June 2010 and will run until 31 October 2011, based at the History Faculty in Oxford. The network was led by Stephen Tuck (OxCRUSH) in Oxford and Cécile Vidal and Nicolas Barreyre (Centre d’Études Nord-Américaines) in Paris. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the University of Jena in Germany were partner institutions.

 

People