Just Like Us by Thomas Borstelmann

Author:Thomas Borstelmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Americans Abroad

Some Americans have ventured abroad in every era, but historians and others have not always paid much attention to those who did. From the beginning, American society was viewed as a receiver—the receiver, even—of immigrants from elsewhere, and the numbers have certainly supported this perspective. Commentators have used the images of melting pots and salad bowls, among other things, to frame their understanding of how people came to and lived in the United States, but there were few if any prominent metaphors for those who left. Places that sent out large numbers of émigrés were often described in terms of diasporas, such as the African diaspora or the Eastern European Jewish diaspora. Migrant-exporting countries such as China, Ireland, and Italy since the nineteenth century acknowledged and paid attention to their national or ethnic compatriots abroad, often with forms of governmental tracking and support, including encouragement to return. But there was little talk of an American diaspora, even with nine million U.S. citizens living elsewhere by 2015 (enough to constitute the twelfth-largest state, ranking between New Jersey and Virginia). Other than the U.S. government requiring them to continue to file and pay U.S. taxes, few noticed when people left the United States, in contrast to the ample focus on immigrants landing on American shores. Departing folks seemed to be walking off the stage and out of the American story, which was supposed to be all about arriving.4

Americans abroad nonetheless remained part of the U.S. story. Some left for good, building new lives elsewhere, pulled by love or opportunity or curiosity or pushed by previous troubles or persecution. Some went abroad temporarily, as soldiers, diplomats, entrepreneurs, missionaries, students, and tourists and often had significant impacts in other lands before returning home. All carried with them American culture and values, traces of their earlier lives and relationships that formed webs of connection between the United States and the rest of the world. They were wildly diverse: British Loyalists fleeing to Canada or British Caribbean islands after the Revolution, tall-ship traders to East Asia, formerly enslaved African Americans in Liberia, former Confederates in Brazil, miners to Australia, Methodist missionaries in Chinese treaty ports, artists and socialites in Paris and London, World War II soldiers and sailors on every continent and every ocean, oil-industry workers in Saudi Arabia, Vietnam War draft evaders to Canada, Navy SEALs in Cameroon and Somalia, and retirees in Mexico and Nicaragua. In addition to the vast collection of narratives of newcomers to the United States are tens of millions of human stories of Americans who lived abroad. “Isolationism” offers little guidance for understanding the full tapestry of U.S. history.5

The United States of America was born out of one empire and immediately became another. The historian Daniel Immerwahr notes that the new nation’s name was, from the beginning, never quite accurate: “From the day the treaty securing independence from Britain was ratified, right up to the present, it’s been a collection of states and territories,” starting with the then-western lands of the Ohio River Valley.

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