The Pleiades

Here are some topics for discussion for tomorrow’s class.

1. What is Hsu’s argument and how does she use her evidence to support her claims?
2. Let’s do a refresher on an important concept in the book – What is the transnationalism to which Hsu refers?
3. How does Hsu conceptualize the process of migration? Where does it fit in to older “uprooting,” “invasion,” or “assimilation” models?
4. We gained a thorough understanding of the way that the Chinese were viewed in the US through Jung’s Coolies and Cane. One criticism we had of that book was that we didn’t see the actual voices and experiences of Chinese American “coolies.” Do you feel that this book addressed this issue well? Do the Chinese come across as victims or tenacious migrants? *Both*?!
5. How present is race in her discussion of the way immigrants conceptualized themselves and the hardships they encountered? What about class? Gender?
6. Do you think this book is an example for other works on immigration? Can it be adopted to analyze other migrant groups who weren’t as overtly “transnational” as the Taishanese?
7. Are there certain drawbacks to Hsu’s transnational approach or areas where her content fails to live up to the boldly transnational claims she makes in the introduction? What are the limits of ascribing transnational identities to historical peoples if it is viewed as a postmodern phenomenon, as Hsu notes on page 8?

Rose Hum Lee’s The Chinese in the United States of America, published in 1960 by Hong Kong University Press, is another example of a scholar who was entrenched in bothChinese-American culture and academia. She was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and eventually headed a sociology department.

The Chinese in the United States of America reflects the reigning historical and sociological approaches to immigration up to 1960, which focused on assimilation among immigrants. Lee recognized the obstacles many Chinese American women faced in achieving sexual equality and other social problems. Because she located their roots in Chinese culture, she saw the complete assimilation of the Chinese into American culture as the solution. As she writes in the book’s very first paragraph, “Many [Chinese immigrants] have become so integrated in the societies where they themselves or their ancestors settled that they are indistinguishable from the local population: that is the ultimate ideal to which all Overseas Chinese should aspire” (vii).

Lee seemingly analyzes her own role in writing this synthesis of Chinese immigration, assimilation, and integration: “The portrayal of the Chinese in America by one of themselves harbors more perils, impediments, and accusations of bias than if the writer were a rank outsider” (2). Though Lee then argues against the domination of the field by non-Chinese scholars, she clearly aspires to be as “impartial” as these non-Chinese sociologists and historians and often reinforced their critical views of Chinese culture.

Dr. Henry Yu of UCLA has analyzed Lee’s work in depth and argues the following:

“The need for Rose Hum Lee to erase her own identity within her study was not merely the result of the particular demands of the genre of sociological monograph writing; if she had not pretended that she had no relation to the people mentioned in her dissertation, it would have become immediately apparent that she had close connections to every single person she was studying. Her ability to refer to her family in such a detached manner, to the point of even referring to herself in the third person, is striking and serves as a wonderful example of how sociology as a discipline provided a number of ways in which its practitioners could distance themselves from their own lives. The rhetorical device Lee used of removing herself from her texts was not just a literary conceit; it reflected the manner in which the ‘sociological perspective’ of the ‘outsider’ could provide emotional and moral distance from events and people very close to the sociologist.”

Clearly, there is a lot of interesting material in Lee’s work as both an account of Chinese immigration historiography and as an example of the relationship between the Chinese-American writer and the Chinese-American subjects.

This week I followed up on a couple of footnotes from Hsu’s introduction talking about the historiography of Chinese immigration to the United States. I’m now pretty sure I want to analyze how racism and policies relating to the Chinese immigrant population shaped the historiography.

Part of this includes looking at the role of Chinese-Americans who contributed to the historiography while living through the political, racial, and academic obstacles that they described in their narratives (or attempted to minimize). Hsu identified Paul C. P. Siu as one of the “minority of scholars of Chinese America” who actually used “Chinese-language materials to produce groundbreaking work that nonetheless has yet to provide analysis that transcends the nation-state” (Hsu, 188).

So I dutifully checked out Paul Siu’s The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation, not knowing what to expect but knowing that Hsu deemed it as one of the early approaches to Chinese American studies that was not as fully developed as the field is now…and I was gratified to find not only a exemplary study within the book’s pages, but a fascinating backstory to the author, told through an informative foreword and editor’s introduction.

Sui was a member of the Chicago School of Sociology and was one of the Chinese students first recruited by Robert Park to do ethnographic research among the Chinese population (as I previously discussed during my post about “The Oriental Problem”). Though working within what was often a constricting sociological view of immigrants, Siu managed to contribute invaluable scholarship about Chinese social life, particularly through his examination of laundrymen in Chicago. Siu uses the hallmarks of social history’s methods (and the new labor history) before the social history turn, which is quite remarkable: he looks at census records, documents, letters, interviews, and anecdotes to reveal patterns and individual experiences among the hardworking Chinese Chicagoans who worked in laundries. Interesting sidenote: He was also from Taishan, which is the subject of Hsu’s own book!

Unfortunately, his own experience in writing his dissertation, trying to find a job, and get it published was marred through his existence as a Chinese immigrant in a country hostile to people of his background. He found that getting a publisher to accept his dissertation manuscript was difficult because they typically deemed it as of “little interest” to readers. He also faced a lot of prejudice when trying to get an academic job and even encountered rude comments from students who found his English to be “hard to understand” in one university. I will keep examining the works of other Chinese Americans to see how their own experiences played into the writing of their subjects.

Siu first became interested in his study after being encouraged to write a dissertation about what he knew well – and having worked in his own father’s laundry for some time, Siu was well-suited to writing a history of these people. As the editor, John Kuo Wei Tchen notes in his introduction that Paul Siu was unlike many other sociologists or historians who looked at his subjects solely as “objects” for detached academic scrutiny. Tchen cites an author noting that “only those with an interest can be disinterested” – an interesting concept as I go forward in looking at Chinese Americans writing about Chinese Americans.

During class last week, I mentioned that one of the topics I am considering focusing on for my final paper is the way that Chinese-American scholars have interacted with and impacted the historiography about Chinese immigrants. Looking at the early Chinese sociologists who worked with the Chicago School and others, I was struck by how they helped reify but also contest the “Oriental problem” and shape the debates that took place in the 1970s and beyond. That so many Chinese-American scholars were obsessed with questions of assimilation makes sense because they were working within the existing scholarly paradigm…but what else could have affected their way of thinking? It is possible that Chinese Americans felt less pressured to defend themselves as a “successfully assimilated” group once quotas were repealed and Americans largely moved from a melting pot to a multicultural perspective.

I still have a lot more to research about how we got from the earliest works on Chinese immigrants that I read in previous weeks (such as Mary Roberts Coolidge’s Chinese Immigration), so I will continue that next week. This week, however, I realized I should research Madeline Y. Hsu’s life some more since she is the author of Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. I was very intrigued by Hsu’s “personal anecdote” published on George Mason University’s History News Network, which you can read in full here.

Madeline Hsu

I now understand why Hsu was able to write such a transnational book in a way that not many other Chinese American scholars have. As Hsu says,

Unlike most other American-born Chinese-who spend their formative years primarily in the United States-my main points of reference are of the multi-directional movements and fluid processes of adaptation that are possible for mobile agents with the languages and skills to function successfully in different societies. In contrast to beleaguered immigrants who arrive and are expected to disappear into America’s famous melting pot, such transnational migrants–a useful scholarly concept that I encountered in the 1990s and applied to my life in hindsight-do not blend in or remain in one place.

The interview discusses how Hsu spent her early life traveling back and forth in between China and the United States. She then discusses her early difficulties with trying to write history that was not bound by the national, since so much of the discipline constructs “narratives intended to define national borders and the people who belong within.” These histories end up leaving out the experiences of the Chinese or depict them as dire threats to the national fabric. This anecdote is definitely worth a read, and has helped me understand Hsu’s scholarly contribution much more in light of her personal experiences.

This week I continued the strand of historiographical research that I began last week and looked at early approaches to Chinese American studies. This has been a particularly helpful exercise because I had previously only read a few older studies of European immigration as well as critiques of that immigrant paradigm. However, I am now finding – as I expected – that the early literature on Asian migration exhibited many similar but also different problematic features and approaches. I perused a book that Hsu recommended titled Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era, edited by Kevin Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Temple University Press, 1998). I paid particular attention to Henry Yu’s essay, “The ‘Oriental Problem’ in America.”

Yu defines the “Oriental problem” as “an intellectual construction”: “a set of questions, definitions, and theories about Asian immigrants and citizens of Asian
ancestry in the United States – which provided the vocabulary and the concepts for scholarly discussions about Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans between 1920 and 1960.” (192).

Yu argues that the formulation of an “Oriental problem” had a twofold impact on actual Chinese and Japanese Americans who studied this sociological question. The “Oriental problem” served as a way for many of these immigrant intellectuals to frame their existence as the “marginal man” caught between two worlds. Particularly among women who were involved in the Chicago school of sociology, they saw themselves as part of a Chinese immigrant community who could also leave it to become a “modern American,” which often meant “being freed from restricted gender roles” (192).

The other impact of this intellectual framework is that it created a dichotomy between “white America” and “Oriental” immigrants. It reinforced the generalized categorization of disparate migrant groups who typically identified themselves along national lines as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Filipinos. It is obvious that bulking these different groups into one term is problematic, but this theory of the “Oriental problem” may have “created a consciousness that the dilemmas an situations faced by the Chinese and Japanese in America could be understood together” (192). During the 1970s, many Asian migrants and those involved in academia rejected the label “Oriental” because of its long history of defining these migrants as a “problem.” They worked against a paradigm that viewed all adjustments of immigrants as following a four-stage pattern: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. The Chicago Sociologist Robert Park and many others had previously depicted the “Orientals” as failing to assimilate, unable to get past an “uncomfortable accommodation with nativist whites” (195).

The “Asian-American” immigration history that replaced “Oriental history” still identified its subjects largely along the same lines. Yet, the methods and arguments were different. Yu points out that many Asian-Americans had worked within and reinforced the Oriental paradigm in their own scholarship, which is interesting because Madeline Hsu is a Chinese American woman who demonstrates how radically recent Asian-American scholars have abandoned an assimilationist model.

In her introduction, Madeline Hsu is very critical of the historiography on Chinese immigration that dominated the field into the 1970s because these works essentially subscribed to assimilation models. They concerned themselves either with “explicating passage of the Exclusion laws against what was then seen as a minuscule minority in the United States or struggling to explain the unassailability of Chinese.” White and Chinese American academics were both responsible for this work, but Chinese American scholars also occasionally emphasized “the extent to which they had indeed assimilated and contributed to American life” (Hsu, 7). Hsu argues, much in the way Donna Gabaccia has, that this approach still empowers the dominant immigrant paradigm by encouraging assimilation as an end goal or something that was achievable. Instead, Hsu’s work reflects upon the complexities of the immigrant experience by examining how the migrants maintained multiple identities through a transnational existence.

Following the footnotes in Hsu’s book led me to a list of examples that represent the early approaches to Chinese American studies. Therefore, I decided to read up on some of these works by skimming through the books I could find and reading book reviews of them.

I first looked up Mary Roberts Coolidge’s Chinese Immigration. I did a double take when I realized it was published in 1909 and can see that it definitely qualified as an example of an “early approach.” Even a review of the book in the Political Science Quarterly from March 1911  was proof of this, with the opening line stating:

“The American people cannot view with pride the history of their dealings with backward races…through the patient industry of Mrs. Coolidge, we have authentic and cumulative proof that our treatment of the yellow race is on the same level with our ignominious abuse of the red, black, and brown races” (p. 149). Clearly, these words are a reflection of the old paradigm, which may have allowed historians to recognize and sympathize with the difficulties that immigrants faced but still view them as “backwards.”

The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese (1974) by Stuart Creighton Miller further works within a view of the Chinese as the victims who faced bad treatment from Americans who – as his argument goes – had been embracing negative views of the Chinese based on the encounters of diplomats, missionaries, and traders in China. He also notes the role of labor conflict in perpetuating these stereotypes after Americans felt threatened by Chinese migrant workers. Though conceptually limited, this was important work. However, a review in the journal Contemporary Sociology by Ivan Light from UCLA features a disturbing defense of the Americans who produced “unfavorable images” of the Chinese, which may have been “in harmony with realities” such as the “organized vice, filth, despotic government, and slavery” that he thought characterized the Chinese colonies (799). Despite the social issues among the Chinese community, the fact that people were writing about them this way twenty-five years before Hsu’s book shows how far the historiography came in that short time.

Another book, Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer’s The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1939), similarly conceived of these migrants of victims who faced prejudice from other American laborers who feared competition. There are a few more books that Hsu cites that I want to read through next week, and I can tell that they all work within this traditional approach toward Chinese migration, and often orientalized their subjects too. Reading these accounts make me appreciate Hsu’s transnational method much more, because the Chinese migrants are more three dimensional, real human beings through her depictions of the community.

Articles linked above:

J. R. Commons, “Review of Chinese Immigration. by Mary Roberts Coolidge,” Political Science Quarterly , Vol. 26, No. 1 (Mar., 1911), pp. 149-151.

Ivan Light, “Review of The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 by Stuart Creighton Miller” Contemporary Sociology , Vol. 5, No. 6 (Nov., 1976), p. 799.

I recently went through the Journal of Ethnic American History’s 1999 forum on the state of the immigration history field. I was pleased to see Jon Gjerde mention Madeline Hsu’s dissertation as an example of the kind of work that must be done using transnational perspectives. He writes,

And historians of the Chinese diaspora, such as Sucheng Chan and Madeleine Hsu, have illustrated the centrality of centuries old migration patterns that eventually reached the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. But there is occasion for additional work of this kind. We have been shown, for example, that we cannot understand the Chinese diaspora without coming to terms with the centuries old migration pattern that linked the Chinese littoral to settlement communities throughout Asia. We would profit from more work on transnational institutions: How much better could we understand the significance of the Chinese American merchant community in San Francisco if we connected it to commercial organization in Shanghai or Canton?” (Gjerde, 52-53).

Guangzhou is the city formerly known as Canton that Gjerde suggests offers greater insight into the significance of the Chinese American community. And interestingly enough, Hsu’s book that emerged out of the dissertation Gjerde cited examines this subject in great detail, among other matters in the transnational Chinese migrant experience.

When surveying Gjerde’s essay, Donna Gabaccia recognizes the importance of the “Turnerian historians” he speaks of, the students of Frederick Jackson Turner who studied immigration on the American frontier by drawing connections between the migrants European homelands and their new homes. Gjerde views them as early transnational historians but laments that most modern students of migration turn to other fields (sociology in the work of Robin Cohen, anthropology with Nina Glick-Schiller or Arjun Appadurai, post-colonial theory in the work of Homi K. Bhabha, the cultural studies of Stuart Hall, etc.) (131-132). Gabaccia doesn’t find this to be as much a problem as Gjerde, as she thinks it is important to work across disciplinary lines.

Erika Lee’s essay emphasizes the importance of immigration law in the field. Commenting on her essay, Rudolph Vecoli writes, “Although Lee delineates how certain groups, Chinese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Jews, and women, were affected by particular provisions of immigration and naturalization laws, I would have liked more attention paid to another immigrant population which was specifically targeted by enforcement agencies: alleged subversives (terrorists in current parlance).” He then notes that the millions of Muslims who have immigrated to the US in recent years offer an example of a people who are often judged “based on their presumed Islamic faith” and “their Arabness.” I was surprised that he just bulks Arabs under the category of Muslims, since a majority of Arab immigrants are Christian. And Vecoli ignores Pakistani and Indian Muslim immigrants, who form a significant portion of American immigrants. He notes that the group of Arab Muslims is still subjected to old questions asking whether they will assimilate to the “white side” of the racial divide or “contribute to what has been termed ‘the browning of America’?” Just from reading Vecoli’s few comments about these groups of people, I can see that there is a lot more work to be done in my own field as I research the Arab American diaspora as it relates to race and nationalism.

These questions that many immigrants are subjected to relate to the essay by George Sanchez titled “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies.” Unlike Gjerde’s insistence that the field can rely on the work of immigration historians to prosper, Sanchez argues that immigration history must interact closely with other fields to study race, culture, and nation. Now that it has been fourteen years since the publication of this forum, it is clear that immigration historians are increasingly comfortable with interdisciplinary approaches as they attempt to write transnational histories. I see Hsu’s book as an outgrowth of the discussions in this forum.

Forum in the Journal Of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (Summer 1999).

Gjerde, Jon. “New Growth on Old Vines The State of the Field: The Social History of Immigration to and Ethnicity in the United States.”

George J. Sanchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies.”

Erika Lee, “Immigrants and Immigration Law: A State of the Field Assessment.”

Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Comment: We Study the Present to Understand the Past.”

Donna Gabaccia, “Comment: Ins and Outs: Who is an Immigration Historian?”

Elliott Robert, “Comment: Searching for Perspectives: Race, Law, and the Immigrant Experience.”

Jon Gjerde, “Response.”

Erika Lee, “Response.”

This week, I made some progress in two areas as I approached Hsu’s book, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. Since Hsu has framed her book as a transnational work, I first wanted to acquaint myself with transnational theory in greater detail. Second, I started to delve into the immigration historiography that Hsu really adds to with her own research. Therefore, I also looked at a series of articles on the state of the field that Caleb recommended, which is the focus of my next post.

During the week that our class read Paul Quigley’s Shifting Grounds, we had a very interesting discussion that left me with many questions about the methods of doing transnational history and how to reflect the experiences of people who do not operate within a uniform national framework. I had resolved to read Ian Tyrrell’s Transnational Nation this week, but forgetting to pack it in my luggage when I went out of town prompted me to instead read the American Historical Review Forum entitled “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History.” I have previously read a book he wrote on worldwide missionaries and reformers, which allows me to see how he actually moves his transnational theories into practice in his historical work. Reading this conceptual article and the responses has helped me gauge how successful Hsu is at telling a transnational story of immigration that moves beyond tropes of the old nationalist, American-centric immigrant paradigm.

In the lead article in this AHR forum, Tyrrell decries the growth of comparative history, which was “a product of consensus historians’ preoccupation with American uniqueness” and often allows a “systematic testing of exceptionalist ideas” (p. 1035). In his response, Michael McGerr agrees with Tyrrell’s basic argument that exceptionalist history must be minimized, but he is more wary of transnationalism. He cites the example of Randolph Bourne’s 1916 essay about immigrants who came from around the world to the United States as a way to defend exceptionalism. Bourne believed, as so many other immigration historians have, that the United States was exceptional because it was the only nation that was formed by immigrants. Such a “cosmopolitan enterprise” in America was supposedly due to “the unique liberty of opportunity and traditional isolation for which she seems to stand” (1063).

McGerr argues that this is proof that sometimes exceptionalism could LEAD to transnationalism instead of hinder it, and thus seems to want to prove that 1) sometimes exceptionalism is acceptable, and 2) transnationalism doesn’t always impede exceptionalist story-telling. However, as Donna Gabaccia and Hsu argue, telling an American-centric story of immigration that highlights exceptionalism actually masks much of the immigrant experience. When historians move beyond the earlier immigrant paradigm and access sources from the immigrants’ homelands, the stories become much more complicated and prove just how weak exceptionalist, nation-based conceptions of immigration are.

The forum’s debate goes on and gets more convoluted. Tyrrell clarifies many of his points to make them less bombastic; for instance, he suggests ways to improve but not abolish comparative history. Overall, it was an interesting debate and I don’t think McGerr’s arguments were very convincing. He was understandably nervous about the prospect of completely revamping the way history was typically written until in 1991. Yet, by looking at Hsu’s book, I can recognize her framework of transnationalism as superior to the way the stories of Chinese immigrant workers and their families are usually depicted in history. Her sources and methods move beyond merely comparative, or American-centric, but show the flows between two cities, two regions, two cultural groups, and two nations. Nation-states are still a part of the narrative, just as the differences between these two areas are highlighted. But the new transnational history cannot be reduced to mere comparisons or differentiations that indicate exceptionalism.

AHR Forum: 

Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 1031-1055. Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2164993.

Michael McGerr, “The Price of the New Transnational History”, ibid., 1056-1067, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2164995.

Ian Tyrrell, “Ian Tyrrell Responds,” (pp. 1068-1072), ibid., http://www.jstor.org/stable/2164995.

Madeline Y. Hsu’s Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 tells the complex story of Chinese migration between the city of Taishan in China’s Guangdong province and the United States. Reading this book has been very interesting and I’ve been taking my time to enjoy the details (the perks of presenting my book last, one might say). Hsu’s writing is quite beautiful at times and very lucid. She has a firm grasp of the people and events that make up her narrative, and her personal investment in these subjects is clear in the book’s even-handed but sympathetic descriptions of Chinese migrants.

Location of Taishan in the Guangdong Province

Hsu opens her book with a discussion of how Taishanese immigrants made their way across the Pacific Ocean to find themselves in California. She discusses the various factors that contributed to emigration, including political unrest, numerous floods, droughts, earthquakes, typhoons, and epidemics. Economic distress contributed to and was exacerbated by many of the political troubles in the Guangdong province, especially after the first Opium War from 1839-1842 (Hsu, 24-25). Thus, by the 1850s, many Chinese immigrants came to the United States in search of jobs mining gold in California.

Hsu discusses the early experiences of these Chinese migrants in America and how they maintained connections with their families back home. These immigrants typically had dreams of return and sent remittances home that helped establish Taishan as an economically successful and well-developed town. She then discusses the intricacies of immigration law and how Chinese immigrants were able to “slip through the Golden Gate” despite the Chinese Exclusion Act. Family is a major theme in this book, and Hsu focuses on how the intense loyalty that immigrants and their families had for each other helped them mitigate the traumas of separation. An analysis of print culture forms a large segment of Hsu’s narrative because it furthered communication and a sense of community between Chinese who were abroad and those in their homelands.

This book is a welcome addition to recent works in migration that have moved beyond the “immigrant paradigm” that Donna R. Gabaccia decries in her article, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of the United States.” Her goal was the “question the tyranny of the national in the discipline of history” (1116), a goal that Hsu pursues in her own work. The immigrant paradigm is something we’re all probably familiar with from any of our readings on America’s immigrant heritage: poor people with a solidified identity came from *nations* overseas to the United States in search of economic opportunity, experience intense hardships, and eventually adapt. Gabaccia’s experience with studying Italian immigration led her to argue that this paradigm is too simple to capture the more complicated history of immigrants. When Gabaccia stopped looking at “Italian immigration to the United States” but instead started focusing on “Italian migration,” she began to find previously unnoticed connections. Gabaccia’s solution to the immigrant paradigm is doing transnational history, and Hsu’s book is an example of a recent work that uses the transnational approach. Gabaccia’s article has been helpful for allowing me to see why Hsu’s approach is superior to – and much more interesting than! – the kind of works I’ve previously read about Chinese immigrants.

I have a whole lot of questions regarding the transnational trend which has become the watchword of migration studies (and most of the historical field, really). I’ve spent most of this semester reading theoretical works on transnational history but there is so much more to look at. Therefore, I’m going to read Ian Tyrrell’s Transnational Nation next to get a better grasp of transnational theory.

Madeline Yuan-Yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000).

Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?  Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,”Journal of American History, Vol. 86 (1999), 1115-34.

American mass culture as an imperial showcase! Poster depicting Buffalo Bill's Wild West Congress of Rough Riders. 1899. Library of Congress.

Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes’ Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 is a welcome study of the ways that mass culture spread throughout the United States and impacted the rest of the world. Published in 2005, the work arrived at a time when transnational history had been the watchword of historians for some time, and this book takes into consideration the recent calls for a historiographical approach that incorporates the global into our nation-based histories. Rydell and Kroes look at nationalism with a critical eye and note that the United States was hardly united for much of its early history, especially leading up to the Civil War era. They examine mass culture because it served as a unifier for disparate parts of America. The regions were finally physically united by railroads, and the telegraph, postal service, newspapers, and radio helped disseminate information and new forms of entertainment.

Moreover, the mass culture that helped solidify the American polity then spread across the Atlantic and permeated the often rigid cultural quarters of Europe. In Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender makes an appeal for a less nation-centered analysis that incorporates a global perspective. Bender does not argue that historians should merely study American foreign relations in greater numbers. Instead, “The point is that we must understand every dimension of American life as entangled in other histories. Other histories are implicated in American history, and the Untied States in implicated in other histories” (Bender, Rethinking American History, 6). Rydell and Kroes do a good job of showing how other histories are implicated in American history through mass culture, though maybe the focus on the “Americanization” of the world is overstated and reaffirms the typical exceptionalist narrative.

P.T. Barnum's American Museum, New York City. 1855. Library of Congress.

Buffalo Bill in Bologna was an extremely fun and informative read. The first chapter discusses the origins of mass culture by focusing on Vaudeville theater, traveling circuses, “Wild West” shows, popular books, photography, and department stores. Kroes and Rydell’s discussion of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum shows explains Barnum’s rise to fame and fortune through his popular “freak” shows. What was notable about his particular brand of entertainment was his uncanny eye for public relations and understanding his audience. The authors quote David Boorstin as writing that Barnum’s chief discovery “was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived” (21). As I read the rest of the book, I was struck by how apt this description is when applied to other forms of mass culture until the present. Mass culture is predicated on the faster spread of ideas, more immediate access to information and entertainment; but at the end of the day, people usually privilege entertainment over all else. Maybe this is how Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the yellow journalism leading up to the Spanish-American war could capture the nation’s attention and pave the way to imperialism.

Subsequent chapters focus on world’s fairs to show the expansion of America’s “cultural frontiers” at home and abroad. Mass culture was not without its detractors, of course. Numerous American intellectuals during the World War I era and Europeans decried mass culture as a scourge on higher cultural and artistic forms and “dehumanizing.”

Rydell and Kroes argue that mass culture promoted “dreams of empire and consumerism” (72). I was reminded of Paul Kramer’s essay on imperialism in the American Historical Review when reading this book because the authors pay special attention to the ways in which American mass culture reified imperial ideology. From circuses to other forms of entertainment, mass culture shaped dominant views of race, civilization, and imperialism. The authors use Edward Said’s term “orientalism” to discuss the ways that mass culture featured displays of Middle Easterners to characterize them as the “other.” For example, refer to the image of Buffalo Bill’s “Congress of Rough Riders” that depicted the “Arabs” from “Soudan.” Similarly, Native Americans, Filipinos, blacks, and European immigrants were also caricatured or portrayed as uncivilized. A key tenet of Said’s thesis is that these cultural or even scholarly depictions of the “other” hold real power because they often encourage imperial action.

Despite the hold of mass culture on the American public and the rest of the world, the authors show that mass culture was not merely imbibed by the public and all its messages passively received. The debates that are present within these book’s chapters and the diverse reactions to mass culture show that producers of these forms did not always hold all the power, but also encountered mass culture’s limits.