The writing of history is closer to fiction than any fiction. It is always biased, tendentious, subjective, manipulative, political, and propagandistic.
There is, however, one characteristic that distinguishes the American way of writing history from everybody else’s. When I read history books published in Spain, the UK, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, or Latin America, I am likely to find any number of lies and mistakes, yet all of these books will have one thing in common: every historic moment they discuss will feature a number of players who will interact with each other in a variety of ways based on their own, often conflicting interests.
American history writing only features a single player, godlike in its omnipotence and loneliness. Each history book discusses this character’s interaction with itself. That lonely, all-powerful player is, of course, the United States. The possibility that there might be other players on the world arena, with an agency and needs of their own never even registers.
So if you pick up, say, a history of Guatemala or World War I or the USSR or anything else written by an American, you will discover that the book isn’t really about Guatemala or World War I. It will be about the US creating and acting upon Guatemala, etc.
I’m not sure if there are any American medieval historians of note, but if they do, God, how they must suffer because of the incapacity to stick the US into every sentence.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is really interesting and something I didn’t know. I grew up, and still live in, Europe and always got history lessons from European text books and teachers. We learned about the rises and falls of governments in Russia, we learned about Canadians during WOII, we learned about the Vikings and how they discovered North-America, we learned about the age of discovery, we learned about the West Indies and we learned about some involvement of the USA to name a few, but always from a different perspective. I can’t imagine it any other way.
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This is not completely true. There are some exceptions. I don’t mention the US once in my latest article on the Crimean Tatars which was published in a Turkish journal. But, I think this is because of a couple of reasons. First, there is the issue of sources and their language. Americans find it much easier to access US sources in English. Thus it for instance much easier for us to write a history of US policy towards a place than the actual history of a place. Second, for some unknown reason many US historians think they have a moral obligation to present the US as the source of all the world’s ills and all other nations as victims of the US. I am now wondering if the ideological justification is really just an excuse for the laziness of not learning foreign languages.
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“Second, for some unknown reason many US historians think they have a moral obligation to present the US as the source of all the world’s ills and all other nations as victims of the US.”
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Then why, of all people, do you support Bernie Sanders for President?
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I would vote for Hillary if I were allowed to vote in this country.
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“I am now wondering if the ideological justification is really just an excuse for the laziness of not learning foreign languages.”
This!!! I teach German at a large university and I regularly encounter advanced (finished with other courses and comps/writing a prospectus) graduate students who need German for their research projects who are muddling around in first and second year language courses. I’m sorry, but you really shouldn’t start your dissertation on Kant before you’ve mastered basic verb conjugations. The worst case was a guy who claimed he had written half of his dissertation on an Austrian philosopher when he discovered that one of the philosopher’s books had never been translated into English. So he was sitting in beginning German because he needed to read this book to finish his dissertation.
I’ve also been on a committee reviewing graduate student applications for summer research grants several times and this seems to go on all over the place. I’ve seen people with two years of Spanish planning to go do archival research involving hand-written 16th century materials, and others with three semesters of French planning to do in-depth ethnographic interviews with working class Parisian teenagers. Some of the grad student applicants do appear to have great language skills (lots of courses, study abroad, glowing evaluations from language faculty), but there are always several that are wildly under-prepared. But these graduate students always seem to have great letters from their advisors who assure the committee that the student’s language skills are up-to-the task.
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“I regularly encounter advanced (finished with other courses and comps/writing a prospectus) graduate students who need German for their research projects who are muddling around in first and second year language courses.”
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You’re preaching to the choir.
I blame the faculty in other departments for allowing this to happen. They shouldn’t allow graduate students to pick dissertation topics if they don’t have the basic research skills to complete them. Though I should add that the History department at my university is actually very good on this point, their students always seem to have reasonably good language skills for what they want to do. The absolute worst offenders are Philosophy and Religion, followed closely by Music History and Art History.
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