American History, British Historians: The Trans-Atlantic Perspective

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"What should they know of England," Rudyard Kipling famously asked, "who only England know?" In a recent U.S./U.K. collaborative volume devoted to exploring the enduring legacy of the American Civil War, Charles Joyner invoked the sentiment--and in some ways the context, given the ongoing debate over the Confederate flag--of Kipling's query when he observed that "any history studied only by insiders, or any history studied only by outsiders, is only half studied" (Joyner, "'Forget, Hell!': The Civil War in Southern Memory," in Susan-Mary Grant and Peter J. Parish, eds., Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War [Baton Rouge, 2003], 18). British academia's interest in the United States has a long history, and British scholars, as Michael J. Heale has noted, enjoy "the peculiar condition" of being "simultaneously members of two academic worlds, British and American, and have to give heed to both." In some ways, this mitigates the …