British superiority

My post about the prodigiously superior drinking habits of the British over the Americans has unleashed quite a stink on Justin Webb's BBC blog about America. But apart from yobbishness, at what do the British clearly beat the Americans?

Certainly not sports or business or technology or engineering change or being cheerful or over-eating or self-reflection.

As the London Times' Juliet Gardiner suggests, Britain's greatest export to America are the country's historians. Imported British historians like Peter Brown, Simon Schama, Linda Colley and Mark Mazower are unmatched in an America which is rich in futurists, but whose historians are generally either overly academic or saccarine. Even the best historians of America are British -- the general narratives by Paul Johnson (A History of the American People) and Hugh Brogan (The Penguin History of the USA) being much more readable and worldly than anything that the natives have written.

Not only are the British are good at looking backwards, but they also excel in polishing up the past and selling it to readers. So, given the general nastiness of British life now, what local historians owe us is a compelling narrative of the country's yobbishness. How and why has Britain been transformed into a country of louts? In what year did it all originate? And who is the patron saint of British bad behaviour?

Perhaps such a book already exists. Anyone know of a good history of the English yob?

Comments

[Stephen Smoliar]

Andrew, I suppose this is an excellent example of the parting of the ways between THE NEW YORK REVIEW, on the one hand, and some amalgam of PROSPECT and the London TIMES on the other. How many American historians (as opposed to those feeble-minded futurists) have you actually read? Arthur Schlesinger set a pretty high bar for writing history; but, if you peruse THE NEW YORK REVIEW and drop in on Book TV at the right time, you will find any number of contemporary historians who have risen to Schlesinger's standard without being academic (or, for that matter, overly sentimental). There is even a new father-son tradition in the McNeill family (John and William) that may be viewed as raising Schlesinger's bar!

[andrew]

Stephen -- don't agree. What is Schlesinger's best book? And why has he set such a high bar? I don't get the sense that anything he's written will last....

[Vince Williams]

Andrew, in my experience, the British yobs seem to be at their worst when on holiday-- naturally. They terrorize the Costa del Sol in summertime from Marbella to Fuengirola and Torremolinos. And... I don't know if it's the insularity of Ibiza, or the Ecstasy, but something about the place seems to excite the anima/animus of the Anglo-Saxon beast.

I don't mind serving as Spanish interpreter for a tattooed Pict, but I do take offense at being disparaged for not taking part in the drunken entertainment of the English yobs in my hotel, who can be the most parochial people on earth.

To say they "are not a receiving culture" isn't the half of it.

Most of the reading public in the US will probably never know if the British historians are as great as you say because they don't have the time to read them, but that's the lot of the Great Unwashed working class. I have the time, just now, but I've been too busy reading Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe, which is superb.

When I consider the superiority of British historians, my mind turns to Edward Gibbon and his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I guess he set the precedent for British historians having "a particular ambition to engage with a wider public, a tradition of wanting to tackle large themes and make them comprehensible to a general audience", albeit in six volumes.

Gibbon put the blame for the decline and fall on a loss of civic virtue among the Roman citizens, which led to the Romans finally being conquered by their barbarian mercenaries. I find some humor in thinking that the British iteration of empire was done in by its own mercenary barbarians.

VW

[Stephen Smoliar]

Andrew, one could begin at the beginning with THE AGE OF JACKSON. More recent books (Sean Willentz) have been written on this topic (which has a lot to do with the origins of the Democratic party as we now know if); but Schlesinger's influence continues to be felt on this theme. My favorite, however, is ROBERT KENNEDY AND HIS TIMES, less for my admiration of RFK than for the way Schlesinger lays out all the opportunities we missed during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Then, of course, there are his essays (many of which appeared in THE NEW YORK REVIEW, where you can also read essays by both McNeills, not to mention Vann Woodward and James McPherson). My top pick in this space would be "Has Democracy a Future?," which appeared in FOREIGN AFFAIRS in 1997 (and then was included in WAR AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY).

To expand on VW's point, my guess is that most Americans do not read ANY history, whatever the period and whatever the nationality of the historian. On the other hand how many Brits actually read the historians you enumerated. For that matter, how many of them take the time to watch Schama in his new incarnation as a "television don?" I am not saying Americans are any better, but I think you are selling our historians short.

[Barrie Douce]

I would recommend the follow book published in England about our country's drinking habits. Binge drinking ("Binge" is believed to come from the Belgium town of Binche location of a festival of eating and drinking to excess) is not a new phenomenon in England at all, as the title of the book does exactly what it says on the tin (an English expression but hopefully self explanatory).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Drinking-England-Great-English-Drinkers/dp/1906217165

[andrew]

thanks Stephen. Interesting that the historians you list write about America. While all the British ones I listed write about countries outside Britain.

[Stephen Smoliar]

Andrew, if you go back to my first comment, the major McNeill father-son collaboration was THE HUMAN WEB, whose subtitle is "A Bird's-Eye View of World History!" My case may be continued by examining the books that each of them wrote individually. Who writes about Britain, then? Niall Ferguson (now at Harvard)?