A235, History of American Empire

Tuesday

Originally from a small town in New Jersey, and in 2018 a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, Suzy Hansen after college unexpectedly found herself taking a job as an American journalist stationed in Turkey, a country about which she knew very little.  Hence, Hansen experienced an intense learning process, on multiple levels.  One of the most challenging aspects of any learning process is learning what one does not know — what exceeds a person’s prior education, experience, and imagination.  One might expect that a learning process in another country amounts mainly to learning the languages, histories, and cultures of that country — but Hansen came to realize that such learning, as hard as it was, was only the beginning.  There was also at the same time a lot more to learn about the United States, her own upbringing, and the country’s long and winding relationship with Turkey.

Originally from Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie came to the United States to complete her college education and then to pursue graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University.  Her novels have won numerous literary prizes, and in 2008 she was awarded a so-called MacArthur Genius Grant.  Like Hansen, Adichie too experienced an intense learning process, but in the opposite direction:  as a non-American in America, rather than as an American abroad.  Adichie had to learn about the peculiar racialized system in the United States, so different from how the status of people were understood in Nigeria.  In her oft-viewed 2009 TED talk (nearly 39 million views!), Adichie extends from the question of race to consider the danger of ANY kind of “single story.”

A history professor at Northwestern University, Daniel Immerwahr in 2019 published How to Hide an Empire to highlight one massive difference between, for instance, the British empire ascendant in the 19th and into the 20th century, and the United States empire ascendant since the mid 20th century, or the Chinese empire ascending in the early 21st century.  While the British empire tended to boast of itself, the American as well as Chinese empires have tended more to hide their empires, at least from their own publics, if not from the rest of the world.

Born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Seth Rockman now is a professor of American history at Brown University.  In this excerpt from an introductory course lecture, he eloquently explains one of the fundamental missions of history as an academic discipline.