Debunking the myth of the "Americanization" of Europe, a noted historian presents an authoritative and engrossing cultural history of how America tried to remake Europe in its own image, and how the Europeans successfully retained their identity in the face of American mass culture. Pells provides a new paradigm for understanding the survival of local and national cultures in a global setting.

In this stimulating and highly original study of the writing of American history, twenty-four scholars from eleven European countries explore the impact of writing history from abroad. Six distinguished scholars from around the world add their commentaries. Arguing that historical writing is conditioned, crucially, by the place from which it is written, this volume identifies the formative impact of a wide variety of institutional and cultural factors that are commonly overlooked. Examining how American history is written from Europe, the contributors shed light on how history is written in the United States and, indeed, on the way history is written anywhere. The innovative perspectives included in Historians across Borders are designed to reinvigorate American historiography as the rise of global and transnational history is creating a critical need to understand the impact of place on the writing and teaching of history. This book is designed for students in historiography, global and transnational history, and related courses in the United States and abroad, for US historians, and for anyone interested in how historians work.

This volume commemorates life and oeuvre of Willi Paul Adams. He belonged to a generation of German historians of the United States who shaped the profession in multifaceted ways. Kathleen Conzen, University of Chicago, writes in her commemorative essay: "Willi Paul Adams produced an impressive and varied body of scholarship in his chosen field of American history. He made a lasting contribution to our understanding of the basic principles and processes under which Americans established their first democratic constitutions, stimulated significant inquiry into the political consequences of immigration for the United States, produced three major interpretive surveys of American history for non-American audiences, and gave German readers access through scholarly translations to major documents in the American political tradition."

Highly praised when published in Germany, The Quest for the Lost Nation is a brilliant chronicle of Germany's and Japan's struggles to reclaim a defeated national past. Sebastian Conrad compares the ways German and Japanese scholars revised national history after World War II in the shadows of fascism, surrender, and American occupation. Defeat in 1945 marked the death of the national past in both countries, yet, as Conrad proves, historians did not abandon national perspectives during reconstruction. Quite the opposite—the nation remained hidden at the center of texts as scholars tried to make sense of the past and searched for fragments of the nation they had lost. By situating both countries in the Cold War, Conrad shows that the focus on the nation can be understood only within a transnational context.

Includes appendices.