Mla research paper daly source. History research paper mla format. 133 as expected frequencies and p values. The papers also demonstrate the use of mla style to document sources and the formatting of the margins line spacing and other physical attributes of a printed paper. History Research Paper Example Mla Examples Of Future Plans Essay Ca. Education Research Complete provides indexing and abstracts for more than 2,400 journals, as well as full-text for more than 1,300 journals and 530+ books and monographs,” (EbscoHost, 2019). ERIC 'ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is an authoritative database of indexed and full-text education literature and resources.

How to do research on history? The birth of civilization, the invention of the first gas-powered automobile, the outbreak of the Civil War, the new developments in culture, fashion, and technology, and the passing of time itself all share something in common: They are all major moments in American and world history. Literally hundreds of historical references are accessible in print or electronic form, each providing a unique perspective on history.

One of the most reliable and important sources for your research paper is books, including general references and illustrated histories as well as printed indexes and abstracts specializing in U.S. and world history, all searchable through your local public, school, or college library’s catalog and collections, including additional published works, such as interpretive and analytical secondary sources, about your chosen research paper topic.

Likewise, many electronic resources, including CD-ROM and online databases, available at most libraries provide access to full-text articles on all areas of history, including retrospective collections of major newspapers from the 1800s and earlier, published in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Other primary sources included in your research paper can be original documents and artifacts from university and museum archival collections, with many documents and images accessible on the Web, including the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project. Selected sources in this category as recommended by librarians and researchers follow.

Selected Subject Headings

Listed below is a sample of a few broad Library of Congress subject headings—made up of one word or more representing concepts under which all library holdings are divided and subdivided by subject—which you can search under and use as subject terms when searching online library catalogs for preliminary and/or additional research, such as books, audio and video recordings, and other references, related to your topic. When researching materials on your topic, subject heading searching may be more productive than searching using simple keywords. However, keyword searching when using the right search method (Boolean, etc.) and combination of words can be equally effective in finding materials more closely relevant to your research paper topic.

Suggested Research Topics in History

• African-Americans
• America—Discovery and exploration
• Civil Rights—United States
• Civil War, 1861–1865
• Confederates States of America
• Depressions—1929
• Indians of North America
• Progressives (United States politics)
• Reconstruction
• Revolution, 1775–1783
• Southern States
• Stock Market Crash, 1929
• United States—Foreign relations
• United States History—1873–1865
• United States—History—1919–1933
• United States—History—20th Century
• West (United States)
• Women—Suffrage—United States
• World History
• World War, 1939–1945

Selected Keyword Search Strategies and Guides

Most online library indexes and abstracts and full-text article databases offer basic and advanced “keyword” searching of virtually every subject. In this case, combine keyword terms that best define your thesis question or topic using the Boolean search method (employing “and” or “or”) to find research most suitable to your research paper topic.

If your topic is “blacks and civil rights,” for example, enter “blacks” and “civil rights” with “and” on the same line to locate sources directly compatible with the primary focus of your paper. To find research on more specific aspects of your topic, alternate with one new keyword at a time with “and” in between (for example, “blacks and civil rights leaders,” “blacks and equal rights,” “blacks and racism,” “blacks and segregation,” etc.).

For additional help with keyword searching, navigation or user guides for online indexes and databases by many leading providers—including Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, EBSCO, H.W. Wilson, OCLC, Ovid Technologies, ProQuest, and Thomson Gale—are posted with direct links on library Web sites to guides providing specific instruction to using whichever database you want to search. They provide additional guidance on how to customize and maximize your search, including advanced searching techniques and grouping of words and phrases using the Boolean search method—of your topic, of bibliographic records, and of full-text articles, and other documents related to the subject of your research paper.

Selected Source and Subject Guides

As part of your preliminary research to find appropriate resources for your topic, information source and research guides are available at most public and academic libraries and are keyword searchable through your library’s online catalog (to search and locate guides, enter your “subject” followed by these keywords one search at a time: “information sources,” “reference sources,” and/or “research guide”). Printed guides available for this subject area include

Reference Sources in History: An Introductory Guide, 2nd ed., by Ronald H. Fritze, Brian E. Counts, and Louis A. Vyhnanek (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABCCLIO, 2004)

The U.S. History Highway: A Guide to Internet Resources, edited by Dennis A. Trinkle and Scott A. Merriman, 356 pages (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002)

United States History: A Selective Guide to Information Sources, by Ron Blazek and Anna H. Perrault, 411 pages (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1994)

In addition to these sources of research, most college and university libraries offer online subject guides arranged by subject on the library’s Web page; others also list searchable course-related “LibGuides” by subject. Each guide lists more recommended published and Web sources—including books and references, journal, newspaper and magazines indexes, full-text article databases, Web sites, and even research tutorials—that you can access to expand your research on more specific issues and relevant to your subject.

Selected Books and References

General Source

Handbook for Research in American History: A Guide to Bibliographies and Other Reference Works, 2nd ed., by Francis Paul Prucha, 214 pages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994)

Although slightly outdated, this handbook, first published in 1987 and revised in 1994, remains a useful tool for locating many print and electronic sources for historical research. The book is divided into two sections. The first section highlights bibliographies, indexes to periodical literature, maps and atlases, and government publications. The second section incorporates chapters discussing various other reference sources for broad subject areas, such as military history, and more specialized topics, such as diplomatic history. An author-title-subject index offers easy cross-referencing of subjects.

U.S. History

Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., edited by Stanley I. Kutler, 10 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003)

Originally published in 1940, this fully revised edition of the 10-volume library reference offers quick access to more than 4,000 definitive articles, ranging from 100 to 800 words in length, on a broad spectrum of topics in American history. The new edition includes more than 800 new entries. Incorporated in text for the first time are more than 1,500 illustrations and 300 maps.

Encyclopedia of American History, edited by Gary B. Nash, 11 vols., 4,864 pages (New York: Facts On File, 2003)

This 11-volume reference offers in-depth coverage of the most important individuals, events, and topics in U.S. history. Unlike most encyclopedias, this reference is arranged chronologically and organized by era. The encyclopedia was developed and supervised by Gary B. Nash, a professor of American history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the National Standards for United States History. Each volume was edited by leading scholars and specialists in the field.

Encyclopedia of American Military History, 3rd ed., by Spencer C. Tucker, 1,200 pages (New York: Facts On File, 2003)

Written by military historian Spencer C. Tucker, this well-organized and easy-to-use encyclopedia presents more than 1,200 entries on the subject of American military history from the colonial era to the “war on terror” beginning with the events of September 11, 2001. Illustrated by more than 200 black-and-white photographs and 50 maps, this three-volume set documents seemingly every aspect of military history—military leaders, wars, campaigns, battles, events, famous soldiers, military branches, key technological developments, overviews of weapons systems, and more. Includes a glossary, bibliography, and index.

Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, edited by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, 5 vols., 2,733 pages (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000)

With a foreword written by Pulitzer Prize–winning author James M. McPherson, this five-volume reference set chronicles the Civil War in an easy-to-read A-to-Z format. Combining the efforts of editors and more than 300 contributors, this remarkable reference offers more than 1,600 concise articles—ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages—on seemingly every aspect of this period in American history. Supplementing the entries are more than 500 black-and-white illustrations, 75 maps, and more than 250 primary source documents that bring to life every battle, military life, and the war’s impact on society.

Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social and Military History, edited by Spencer C. Tucker, 3 vols., 1,196 pages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)

This three-volume encyclopedia, written by the author of the Encyclopedia of American History, comprehensively covers the military, social, and political aspects of the Vietnam War. Content includes detailed articles on military tactics and weapon systems, biographies of communist leaders, and critical overviews of the antiwar movement, military strategy, and various nations. Following each entry is a bibliography of references. Volume 3 documents the history of the Vietnam War, highlighted by government memos, military telegrams, speeches, policy statements, and more.

The Oxford Companion to American Military History, edited by Richard Holmes, 1,408 pages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Featuring more than 1,000 entries, this book examines the American military history with factual and extensive essays, written by more than 500 leading scholars, on the major wars and battles, weapons, and leaders.

Reference Sources in History: An Introductory Guide, 2nd ed., by Ronald H. Fritze, Brian E. Coutts, and Louis A. Vyhnamek, 334 pages (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2004)

This annotated and updated volume exhaustively catalogs and summarizes more than 1,000 atlases, bibliographies, chronologies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, and sourcebooks on practically every conceivable subject in history. More than 900 references are included, with bibliographic information cited for an additional 400 sources. This master reference work also includes guides to many history Web sites of interest to undergraduates, graduate students, academic researchers, and the general public.

The Timetables of American History, edited by Laurence Urdang, 544 pages (New York: Touchstone Books, 2001)

One of the best sources of its kind, this fascinating, updated single-volume reference provides a comprehensive account of American happenings—the people and events—in the arts, history, politics, science, technology, and more while simultaneously relating them to world events.

World History

Chronicle of the 20th Century, edited by Daniel Clifton, 1,486 pages (Liberty, Mo.: JL International Publishing, 1994)

This lavishly illustrated, entertaining reference, written in a newspaper-style format, chronicles everything about the 20th century—the people, places, events, fads and fashions, politics, personalities, wars, sports, science, and cinema.

Dictionary of Historic Documents, Revised Edition, by George C. Kohn, 656 pages (New York: Facts On File, 2003)

The only reference of its kind, the Dictionary of Historic Documents, Revised Edition describes and explains more than 2,400 major historic documents in world history, including their historical and social importance. Covered are key acts, agreements, bills, constitutions, court decisions, historic treaties, laws, letters, proclamations, speeches, and other writings, from the Code of Hammurabi to President George W. Bush’s “Freedom and Fear Are at War” speech. Includes a list of entries by category, a timetable of documents, an extensive bibliography, and index.

Dictionary of Wars, 3rd ed., by George C. Kohn, 704 pages (New York: Facts On File, 2006)

Spanning some 4,000 years, this revised book offers detailed summaries of all wars from the earliest in history to the present day. It contains more than 1,800 extensively cross-referenced entries, dealing with civil wars, global confl icts, mutinies, punitive expeditions, rebellions, revolutions, and undeclared wars throughout the world.

The Encyclopedia of World History: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged, 6th ed., 1,243 pages (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001)

Perhaps the best single-volume reference available on the subject, this fully revised and updated edition, written by renowned historian Peter N. Stearns and 30 prominent historians, features a year-by-year and region-by-region chronicle of the history of the world. More than 20,000 authoritatively written entries span the millennia from prehistoric times to the year 2000. Entries cover civilizations, rulers, and historical figures, people, places, and trends, and much more.

Hammond Concise Atlas of World History, 6th ed., edited by Geoffrey Barraclough, 192 pages (Union, N.J.: Hammond, 2002)

Uniquely combines the visual details of a standard atlas with well-written, lively narrative of world history from ancient history through 2001.

A History of the Twentieth Century: The Concise Edition of the Acclaimed World History, by Martin Gilbert, 832 pages (New York: Perennial, 2002)

An extraordinary volume that chronicles in year-by-year fashion world events that shaped the 20th century. Documenting the cultural developments, disasters, religious and social movements, scientific advances, technological innovations, wars, and personalities of the century.

The Random House Timetables of History, 3rd ed., 320 pages (New York: Random House, 2008)

This revised pocket-sized reference provides a chronology of 7,000 years of world history, from the first civilization (4000–2000 BC) to the present. More than 5,000 significant moments in history are highlighted—in the arts, history, religion, and science—for easy reference.

20th Century Day by Day, edited by Daniel Clifton, 1,560 pages (New York: DK Publishing, 1999)

Ideal for students, researchers, and history buffs, this fully updated edition covers the important people, places, and events of the 20th century. Features thousands of color and black-and-white illustrations.

Selected Full-Text Article Databases

Academic Search Elite (Ipswich, Mass.: EBSCO Publishing, EBSCOHost, indexing/abstracting: 1984– , full text: 1990– )

Offers citations and some full text in wide range of academic areas, including business, social sciences, humanities, general academic, general science, education, and multicultural issues.

America Periodicals Series Online (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI ProQuest, 1740–1900)

Full-text and digitized images of more than 1,000 American magazines and journals published between 1740 and 1900. Periodicals include special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children’s and women’s magazines, and many other historically significant periodicals. Many historical topics of interest are covered, including the American Revolution, Reconstruction, and independence; slavery and emancipation; the changing role of women; advances in medicine and technology, and changes in politics, science, and religion.

HarpWeek (Greenwich, Conn.: Harper’s Weekly, 1857– )

A primary source for examining 19th-century American history on a week-by-week basis, HarpWeek contains scanned images, with interactively linked indexes, of Harper’s Weekly from the antebellum and Civil War eras (1857–1865) and Reconstruction period (1866–1871). Covering everything from front-line Civil War reports to the election of President Lincoln, full-text contents include editorials, news stories, illustrations, cartoons, and even advertisements.

History of the World (Parsippany, N.J.: Bureau of Development, Inc., 1994– )

This CD-ROM database contains six highly recognized reference sources on one disk—The Hutchinson Compact Chronology of World History, The Hutchinson Dictionary of World History, The Hutchinson Dictionary of Ideas, The Helicon Book of Days, J. M. Roberts’ Shorter History of the World, and Bing History of the World. The people, ideas, trends, and events that influenced the world since 10,000 BC are featured. There are more than 10,000 entries, quotations, tables, and feature articles, 600 illustrations, a chronology of 11,000 events, and more than 1,200 thematic chronologies. Books can be searched separately or collectively, and can be searched directly from your word processor or through Windows applications. “On This Day” anniversaries and history quizzes are among the added features.

History Resource Center: U.S. (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, precolonial– )

Online resource providing comprehensive full-text coverage of all aspects of American history and more than 50 key topics in U.S. history, among them, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, World War I, World War II, and more, as well as information from Macmillan Reference USA, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and other Gale printed sources, including biographies, encyclopedic articles, and others.

History Resource Center: World (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 1900s– )

This electronic resource provides hundreds of full-text documents, along with thousands of images and maps and statistical data, from some 1,500 sources, including 110 academic and scholarly journals and 27 popular references on every major event in 20th-century world history.

JSTOR (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Journal Storage Project, 1996– )

This comprehensive online archive includes important scholarly journal literature covering many academic fields, including history.

MilitaryLibrary FullTEXT (Ipswich, Mass.: EBSCO Publishing, EBSCOHost, indexing: 1975, full text: 1990– )

Includes citations and some full-text access to more than 350 military and general-interest publications, 245 pamphlets, and indexing and abstracts for more than 380 magazines. Military publications indexed include Army Times, Defense, Military Review, and Parameters.

Palmer’s Full Text Online 1785–1870 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: ProQuest, 1785– )

Palmer’s Full Text Online provides access for students, researchers, and the general public to 1 million articles from The Times covering almost a century of British and world history.

ProjectMUSE (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990– )

Provides worldwide, networked subscription access to full-text articles from more 100 scholarly journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and mathematics.

Selected Periodicals

American Heritage (New York: American Heritage, 1947– , bimonthly)

This popular bimonthly magazine focuses on a wide range of issues related to American history and the American experience, discussing the arts, business, current and international affairs, changing lifestyles, and politics.

American Historical Review (Bloomington, Ind.: American Historical Association, 1895– , five times a year)

The official publication of the American Historical Association, this major historical journal is published five times yearly (February, April, June, October, and December). It includes scholarly articles and critical reviews of current publications in all fields of history. Each issue contains articles by leading scholars, and reviews of books and films.

Chronicon: An Electronic History Journal(Cork, Ireland: University College Cork, 1997– , annually) (http://www.ucc.ie/research/chronicon/)

Published annually by the History Department of the University College Cork since 1997, this free e-journal features articles on all aspects of history with a particular focus on Irish history.

The English Historical Review (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1886– , quarterly)

First published in 1886, The English Historical Review, the oldest English-language scholarly historical journal in the world today, deals with all aspects of British, European, and world history since the classical era. Published quarterly, each issue includes articles and lively debates on medieval and modern themes, book reviews, and summaries of international literature. The English Historical Review is abstracted and indexed by such leading library databases as America: History and Life, Historical Abstracts, British Humanities Index, CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Periodicals Contents Index, and Sociological Abstracts. The full text and tables of contents of current and past journals are available online by subscription through JSTOR and Oxford Journals Online.

Essays in History (Charlottesville, Va.: Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, 1954– , annually)

Founded as a print journal in 1954, this annual peer-reviewed journal is sponsored by the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and has been published solely in electronic format since 1994. It features articles on all areas of history, including book reviews. Essays in History is indexed in the Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life databases. Current and past electronic editions and full-text articles are accessible at the journal’s main Web site (http://search.lib.virginia.edu/catalog/u314929).

The Historian (Kensington, R.I.: Phi Alpha Theta, 1938– , quarterly)

Found in libraries and institutions around the world, this distinguished journal features articles, interviews, and books by historians and graduate students in all fields of history. Continuously in print since the winter 1938 issue, the journal is sponsored by Phi Alpha Theta, an international society of history at the University of South Florida that promotes the study of history and encourages its student members to publish their scholarly works.

Journal of American History (Bloomington, Ind.: Organization of American Historians, 1914– , three times a year)

Published for more than 80 years by the Organization of American Historians, this leading print journal includes scholarly articles, reviews of current books, films, exhibitions, and Web sites of interest to historians, and historical essays on a wide range of topics. Full text of current issues of the Journal of American History is available online through History Cooperative.

Selected Web Sites

Electronic Texts Collections (http://history.hanover.edu/link-lists/etexts.html)

This large collection of links, developed by the History Department at Hanover College, features indexes and other resources on European, American, and world history.

Historical Text Archive (http://historicaltextarchive.com/)

Originally founded in 1990 in Mississippi as an anonymous FTP site, Historical Text Archive offers easy access to a collection of high-quality articles, books, essays, historical photos, and links to information on a wide range of historical subjects.

History Cooperative (Champaign, Ill.: The Cooperative, 2000– ) (http://www.historycooperative.org/home.html)

This site, created for history scholars and students alike, offers full-text access to current issues of many leading historical journals, including the American Historical Review, The History Teacher, Journal of American History, Law and History Review, Western Historical Quarterly, and many others.

HyperHistory Online (http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html)

Features more than 2,000 files on 3,000 years of world history; beneficial to students and historians; listed by people, history, events, and maps.

Internet Library of Early Journals (http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/)

Research Papermac's History Definition

A joint project completed in 1999 by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Oxford under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme, this Web site provides direct access to digital versions of 18th- and 19th-century journals together with bibliographic data. Among the 18th-century journals represented are Annual Register, Gentleman’s Magazine, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; from the 19th century, The Builder, Blackwood’s Edinburg Magazine, and Notes and Queries.

Medieval Review (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 1993– ) (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tmr/)

Formerly known as Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, this all-electronic journal publishes reviews of current work in all areas of Medieval Studies since 1993. Published by the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, the publication offers searchable archives of past issues of interest to students and scholars around the world.

World History Archive (http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/index.html)

For quick access to documents about specifi c topics or periods in history, this archive, arranged by geographical area and covering all regions of the world, features a collection of documents focusing on contemporary history, complete with search engine.

WWW Virtual Library: Military History (http://vlib.iue.it/history/mil/)

Contains a vast collection of research tools with Web links to general and chronological resources, military history, journals, bibliographies, biographies, military museums, and more.

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The history of the United States is usually taught and written about as if the nation was self-contained, not part of any larger history than itself. Yet history operates across space as well as through time, and the history of the Americas, including the United States, shares world history from its very beginnings.

Because the United States is continental in scale and without threatening neighbors, its history is usually focused inward. The most famous continental interpretation of U.S. history is the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, popularized as a story of generations of Europeans moving west. The vision of the United States in Turner’s elegant essay of 1893 is deeply embedded in American mythology. Yet Turner was making the point that this westward movement across the continent was coming to an end; the frontier experience would no longer shape American life and values.

Turner offered his larger reflections on modern history and historical method two years earlier when he explained that “we cannot select a stretch of land and say we will limit our study to this land; for local history can only be understood in the light of the history of the world” (quoted in Bender 2006, 12). He was prompted to make this point in the 1890s because global trade and modern means of communications and transportation meant that all nations were, in his phrase, “inextricably connected.” A hundred years later, in the 1990s, when talk about “globalization” and the “Internet” became pervasive, the same idea dawned upon historians: perhaps American history should be thought about and taught in terms of its global connections and the history it shares with the rest of the planet.

In fact, the modern history of the Americas and global history commence at the same time. Both are the result of the same rapid sequence of events, from the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama (who established a sea route from Europe to India), and the expedition captained by Ferdinand Magellan that circumnavigated the globe between 1519 and 1521. Within a quarter of a century of the first recorded Atlantic transit, the planet had been encircled by oceanic voyages. The great achievement of this “age of discovery” was not only the discovery of America but, more importantly, what could fairly be called the discovery of the “oceanic world.”

This notion requires some explanation. Before the voyage of Columbus maps had shown the ocean as the outer limit of the world, ringing the Afro-Eurasian landmass that was the known world. The Americas were unknown to the peoples of that world, as the Afro-Eurasian world was unknown to the first peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared the Old Testament account of the origins of that world. God had pulled back the ocean to make land for the beginning of the human family, Adam and Eve.

The place that Columbus found and began to explore was first labeled “America” by the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller in 1507; his map first showed the hemisphere as separate from Asia. The name, which Waldseemuller wrote over what is today’s northern Brazil, came from Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who had explored the mouth of the Amazon River in 1499. He called the hemisphere Mundus Novus or “new world.” Educated in the classics, he recognized that the ancients had known nothing of what he saw. But it was new in a different way as well. The ancient Greeks knew that you could sail west from Iberia (Spain) to Asia, except that the ocean was in the way. The discovery that the ocean was not in the way, that it was in fact the connector of all the continents, transformed understanding of the planet. It extended the world to include the oceans as well as the land of the planet, making history global. Rather quickly the new globality entered the literary imagination. A Spanish scholar and writer in 1540 wrote a fantastic account of a journey to the moon, which included a view of the Earth as a globe, prefiguring by centuries the photographic image of the moon made by U.S. astronauts in 1969. The cities, empires, and nations that would develop from the seventeenth century on would be part of global history; their histories could not be wholly separated from that larger history.

The peoples of the world, including the adventurers who established the first settlements in British North America, were worldlier than we usually assume them to have been. Captain John Smith, who rescued from disaster the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, England’s first continental settlement in 1607, is an example. He had seen a good part of the world before he joined the Jamestown project, perhaps somewhat by accident. The usual colonial narrative seems to suggest that his life “abroad” consisted of his few months in Virginia. In fact, that brief experience was embedded in a longer train of experiences in Europe, Central Asia, and Africa that were remarkable but not unique for European adventurers. Smith, who in his teens had gone to the European continent to fight the Catholics, afterward on his return to England met an aristocrat from the former Byzantine Empire. He mentored Smith, making the son of a yeoman into a gentleman. At the age of twenty, he went forth to see the world and to “trie his fortune against the Turks” of the Ottoman Empire, who had recently conquered parts of the Habsburg Empire (Kupperman 2007, 53). He joined the Austrian and Hungarian resistance to the Ottoman armies, learning the art of war, including a command that resulted in the capture of a Hungarian town that had been held by the Ottomans.

His next military adventure, in the service of a Hungarian prince, dragged on in a stalemate, neither side able to mount an effective attack. The Turkish commander proposed that one Christian soldier compete with him one on one to decide the battle. Smith was selected; he beheaded the leader and two subsequent challengers. The Hungarian prince honored him with a Hungarian coat of arms that displayed three heads. In a subsequent battle he was injured, but villagers rescued him and nursed him to health. Then, however, they then sold him into slavery. The noble who bought Smith gave him to his mistress, who became fond of him. To protect him, she sent him to her brother, an Ottoman military officer stationed in the Black Sea region. The officer turned out to be a cruel master, and Smith rebelled, killing the officer. He then fl ed to North Africa, where he met the king of Morocco, who was at that time in correspondence with Queen Elizabeth of England proposing a joint colonization project in the Americas. Smith might have gotten the idea of an American adventure there. At any event, he returned to England and joined the Jamestown project. Does all of this travel and fighting make any difference for American history? Smith thought it had. “Warres in Europe, Asia, and Africa taught me to subdue wilde salvages in Virginia and New England, in America.” (Barbour 1986, 269)

In examining the question of America in the world, this essay does not address the foreign relations of the United States. That is another topic. Here the aim is to show the participation of the United States in world history as part of the common history of the world. It makes the point that the history of the United States is, as Turner suggested, a local example of a larger history that may be global in extent. So the question is whether these larger histories help explain the development of the United States. In fact, major events of American history—and many others besides—cannot be adequately explained other than in part by locating them in world history. For examples, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and Progressivism and the beginnings of the modern welfare state will serve here.

The American Revolution

We usually think of the American Revolution as a very specific and local event: resistance by the thirteen colonies in the face of unwelcome changes in British colonial policies in North America. It was in fact an episode in the “Great War” between England and France. This war lasted episodically for 126 years, from 1689 to 1815, and after 1753 it was a global war, fought on every continent.

The competition between England and France was costly to royal finances. Governments had to show the taxpayers at home that new taxes were worth it, or they had to find other sources of funds, most obviously from the colonies themselves. Historians refer to the financial and governance squeeze as a “military-fiscal crisis.” The British victory in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was so spectacular that it greatly enlarged the empire, at the expense of the French, who lost Canada and trading centers in Africa and Asia. To meet the costs of the war and to secure the new territories, the British crown and Parliament turned to the colonies for new revenue. This decision led to the sequence of infamous (in America) taxes that triggered the resistance that developed into a successful war for independence. But the high cost of empire and imperial wars affected the Portuguese and Spanish empires as well. And they turned to similar strategies. The fiscal crises both faced, as well as new Enlightenment ideas of rational administration, inspired novel imperial policies that promised more revenue.

Any changes in the rules of the game, however, can unsettle established customs and hierarchies of status and power. That happened in all of the empires. Established elites felt that they were being marginalized, that traditional forms of power formerly available to them were being diminished or taken away entirely. They also felt that they were suddenly being treated as second class, when they thought themselves as equal in rights to those in the home country. There were tensions and forms of resistance throughout the Americas, and in the British case expansions of imperial power in India (by way of the East India Company) produced military conflict in the Bengal region of India. There were major eighteenth-century colonial revolts in Colombia and Argentina, and the Portuguese were confronted with a number of smaller plots and rebellions. The rebellion in Peru and the La Plata region of Spanish America in 1782 that was led by Tupac Amaru, descendant of the last Inca king, almost brought down the empire in today’s Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina.

The Thirteen Colonies would not have succeeded in their rebellion without the financial aid, diplomatic support, and military assistance of France. Why did an absolutist monarchy support the American republicans? Because the French had lost badly in the Seven Years’ War, they wanted revenge on Britain. Even the Marquis de Lafayette, who later became a great friend of the Americans, declared that his initial motive for joining the American cause was simply to battle Britain. It was to damage England rather than to help the Americans that France gave its support.

To understand the American Revolution within the context of the long war between France and England that did not end until 1815 is to revise the chronology as well as the geography of the age of revolution. After the Treaty of Paris (1783), which recognized the independence of the United States, the new nation could not fully exercise control over its territory. Britain still had forts in the Ohio Valley, for example. Nor could the Americans protect their sailors from “impressment,” a form of kidnapping of American sailors by the British for service on their ships. Before the United States could fully exercise its independence, the Great War had to end as it did in 1815, with the defeat of Napoleon by the British.

The intense partisanship in the politics of 1790s and creation of political parties, something not anticipated by the founders or provided for in the Constitution, were also a result of foreign issues, particularly a deep division of opinion about the French Revolution and the wars that followed it. But the first American party system, as political scientists call it, and the passionate political conflict associated with it, dissolved in 1815, when the Great War ended. Historians call this postparty period the “era of good feelings,” but this change was not the product of a sudden desire to be nice in Washington; rather it was a result of the end of the international irritant.

This wider view also opens the way for understanding the importance for American history of the third great eighteenth-century revolution: the extraordinarily wealthy French slave colony of Saint Domingue, or as it was called after independence, Haiti. Federalists and Jeffersonians divided over whether to aid and support Toussaint Louverture, the former slave who led the revolution. John Adams was supportive, with materiel as well as foodstuffs, while Jefferson embargoed the second republic in the Americas, a black republic. This largest slave revolt in history shook planters throughout the Americas, including Jefferson, who was in a panic. Ironically, it also gave him his greatest accomplishment as president. The loss of Haiti prompted Napoleon to sell Louisiana.

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The Civil War

The American Civil War is the moral core of American history. Yet it also invites a global framing as part of the nineteenth-century invention of the modern nation-state and the turn against unfree labor— conditions under which people must work against their will, including slavery, debt bondage, serfdom, or prison labor—in the Atlantic world. The immediate transnational context was the European revolutions of 1848. Abraham Lincoln, who had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846, admired the European liberals who were seeking to transform monarchies into parliamentary nation-states. These liberals, as well as Lincoln and the Republican Party, linked nation and freedom, with the nation a vehicle for achieving greater freedom.

Lincoln also absorbed their redefinition of the meaning of national territory, particularly the demand for homogeneity within national borders. In central Europe homogeneity meant linguistic or ethnic homogeneity, but that was not the meaning for Lincoln. He had strongly opposed the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party of the 1850s; for him homogeneity meant the nation would be all free or all slave. That was the underlying logic and conclusion of the famous “House Divided” speech he delivered in 1858. Of course, the nation had been divided from the beginning. It was a political problem to be compromised, as it was in the 3/5 clause of the Constitution and in subsequent compromises, such as the Missouri Compromise that established a line equally dividing slave and free territories. The new Atlantic-wide understanding of the nation-state made such compromise impossible. The passion of Lincoln and those who supported the Republican Party in 1860 cannot be understood without awareness of this new understanding of the nation that was circulating around the globe.

The United States was also experiencing a federative crisis, arguing over the relation of national and local power. The Republicans were strong nationalizers, while southern politicians embraced decentralization that would allow individual states to protect their “peculiar institution.” This struggle between centralization and decentralization was a global phenomenon, and wars were fought in Europe (Germany and Italy) and Latin America, particularly in Argentina, but also Brazil and Chile. The issue was resolved without war in Japan, with the Meiji Restoration, and in Siam, today’s Thailand, where a modern state structure was established under the leadership of the monarch. Although the nationalist revolution in Hungary against the Habsburg Empire failed in 1848, Hungary achieved self rule in domestic matters in 1867, under what became the Austro-Hungarian “Dual Monarchy.” There were also efforts to strengthen the Russian and Ottoman empires, making then more like modern European states. Equally important, emancipation, or freedom, was part of the process of nation making in the middle of the nineteenth century. While the United States freed four million slaves, another forty million serfs were emancipated in the Habsburg, Russian, and other empires.

Not only did Americans feel themselves part of the liberal movements of 1848, a point made repeatedly by Lincoln—and by common soldiers as well—but the great European liberals, from John Stuart Mill in England to Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy to Louis Kossuth in Hungary, also understood the American Civil War to be a crucial episode in the history of liberal reform well beyond the United States.

Progressive Reform and the Welfare State

American progressivism was part of a broad transformation of laissez faire liberalism into what was called variously the new liberalism, economic liberalism, or social liberalism. Its beginnings in the United States were in the 1890s and it culminated in the American welfare state in the 1930s established by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. This movement was part of a global response to massive urbanization and industrialization under conditions of unregulated capitalism. A global menu of reform ideas was available to all industrializing nations. Many of the key ideas originated in the economics seminars of German universities; these ideas were particularly important in the United States and Japan. But there was a general circulation of ideas; all industrial nations were borrowing ideas from each other.

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Somewhat counter-intuitively, reformers realized that modern urban and industrial society held more daily life risks than did the agricultural era. Modern society is a risk society, no safer than a jungle, and it required novel forms of protection. This was pointed out in the very title of the reform novel published by Upton Sinclair in 1906: although set in a city, Chicago, the title was The Jungle. Risk is best addressed by insurance, and what became the twentieth-century welfare state was a combination of regulation and social insurance.

All urban and industrial nations developed programs of insurance against old age, industrial accidents, illness and injury, and unemployment. If the ideas were in general circulation, the policy outcomes were distinct. While other industrial nations included health insurance in the social liberalism package, the United States did not. On the other hand, the United States moved very fast to protect pure food and drugs, beginning with milk inspection in the 1870s in New York City.

Here is where one must be careful, however. If the policy ideas and examples were available to all, the politics of reform had national distinctions. Why? Local cultural and political traditions, national politics, the balance of interests produced different versions of the new liberalism. For example, opposition to the reforms came from different groups in different nations: in Latin America and Russia it was the landed classes; in the United States and Japan it was big business. This is why a national history in a global context is not global history. It is both global and national, but in the end the point is to explain a national history.

By examining the history of the United States in the larger context of world history, national history is not dissolved but rather its distinctiveness becomes clearer. But the global context also provides fuller explanations of how change has happened, and it becomes easier to understand why U.S. history differs from other histories as well as to better understand how much is shared.

It is often claimed that American history is exceptional; placing American history in a global context undermines this exceptionalist notion of American history. Yet the specific distinctive aspects of the history of the United States, those that make it a unique nation, are clarified and accented. The problem with an exceptionalist interpretation of American history is that is presumes a norm, or a rule, that has one exception, the United States. That implies that the United States does not share a history with other nations, thus putting the United States outside of the common history of humankind, which obviously is not the case. There is a second problem with the argument for exceptionalism. The claim of exceptionalism requires a norm followed by everyone else. But there is in fact no norm. A global perspective reveals a spectrum of unique resolutions of many common or even universal challenges. A global perspective reveals that the United States is unique but not exceptional.

Bibliography:

1. Barbour, P. (Ed.). (1986). The complete works of captain John Smith (1580–1631), 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
2. Bender, T. (2006). A nation among nations: America’s place in world history. New York: Hill & Wang.
3. Bender, T. (Ed.). (2002). Rethinking American history in a global age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
4. Guarneri, C. (2007). America in the world: United States history in global context. New York: McGraw-Hill.
5. Kupperman, K. O. (2007). The Jamestown project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6. Reichard, G. W. & Dickson, T. (Eds.). (2008). America on the world stage: A global approach to U.S. history. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
7. Rodgers, D. T. (1998). Atlantic crossings: Social politics in a progressive age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8. Turner, F. J. (1961) Frontier and section: Selected essays of Frederick Jackson Turner. (Ray A. Billington, Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
9. Tyrrell, I. (2007). Transnational nation: United States history in global perspective since 1789. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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