In 1932, AHA President Herbert Eugene Bolton addressed the annual meeting of U.S. Historians, delivering the speech that would be titled “The Epic of Greater America.” Bolton opened his speech noting that the American Historical Association might be better denominated “The United States Historical Association,” but he hoped to change that parochialism by bringing in scholars from other countries (the meeting was in Toronto that year) and reconsidering what American History should be. He argued that for many historical problems, a hemispheric approach was the only way to capture the past and escape narrow, nationalistic explanations—the bugbear of American exceptionalism. Bolton’s thesis—the idea of a "common history" of the western hemisphere—faced a diverse array of reactions, ranging from subtle acceptance to explicit rejection. The debate raged into the 1960s, when Lewis Hanke published Do the Americas Have a Common History: A Critique of the Bolton Theory. A half century later, the debate has still not been resolved. While few U.S. historians would openly defend American exceptionalism, a perusal of scholarly output on U.S. history reveals that most historians still employ a nationalistic framework, many make assumptions about the uniqueness of the U.S. story, and most certainly do not read or cites historians of the larger Americas (especially if those works are in Spanish or Portuguese). American exceptionalism has few open defenders but legions of practitioners.

This roundtable challenges the common image of the Americas as two well-bounded and separate units, existing independently from each other. In this view, the hemisphere appears as a space of irreducible political identities, a handful of “Americas” competing with each other, effacing uneven ties that have shaped, precisely, the very existence of the continent. Instead, this roundtable identifies concrete spaces of interaction and specific actors which contributed to create common languages and establish subtle and fragile solidarities within a mounting hierarchical hemisphere, oftentimes shaped by inequality and violence. The panelists will explore specific moments where a hemispheric framework offers new ways of understanding historical problems (such as slavery (in the work of Castilho), hemispheric abolitionism (Fitz and Castilho), postempanciaption societies (Sanders and Castilho), American identity (Hensel and Fitz), imperialism (Lasso and Hensel), and modernity (Sanders and Lasso), as well as theoretical and methodological approaches to comparative and especially connected histories, such as stereotypes of Latin America inhibiting comparison (Sanders and Fitz) and literary analysis (Hensel and Castilho).

The roundtable will unite scholars who all conduct research and have published on transnational themes, but often starting from different parts of the hemisphere: Colombia (Sanders, Hensel, Lasso), Mexico (Sanders, Castilho), Panamá (Lasso), Brazil (Castilho), and the United States (Fitz). For this conversation on the Americas, we think it is vital that the panelists are based, institutionally, not only in the United States, but in other parts of the continent as well.