For a variety of reasons, the study and teaching of both United States history in general and the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in particular should be thriving in Canada more than in other nations. Geographic proximity and shared language would advance this probability, even if the pervasive presence of American mass media did not. For students in Canadian colleges and universities, a combination of exposure to American doings through television and little prior academic opportunity to explore the history of the United States often whets an appetite for study at the post-secondary level. Interest in the GAPE arises — if for no other reason — from the fact that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Canadians and Americans witnessed the emergence of corporate capitalism as a, perhaps the, principal shaper of their societies. At the last count in December 2001, Canada contained the largest concentration of H-SHGAPE subscribers outside the United States (25).

In the courses on U.S. history I teach in Mexico, this speech by Maine congressman Severance serves well to illustrate arguments of the opposition movement to the U.S.-Mexican War. Severance offers a variety of reasons for his anti-war stand, but to my students I like to emphasize this particular one, for it follows a logic contrary to their nationally-framed perceptions. What Severance suggests here, is that these two countries share a common identity, namely that of being “the two largest republics of the world” based on “the principles of civil liberty and elective government,” and that therefore they ought not to be at war. My insistence on a perspective that views the commonalities of the two countries' historic experiences has been futile, however, when teaching about a war that resulted in the “transfer” - to put it in neutral terms - of over half of Mexico's national territory to the U.S. Students are little impressed by this congressman's (and my own) argumentation and stress instead what divides Mexico and the U.S., not only with regard to this historical event, but also with regard to the countries' pasts as a whole. For instance, in a conference at a university in Toluca, my efforts to make my audience understand the internal dynamics of U.S. foreign policy during the 19th century not only appeared to fall on deaf ears but also provoked nearly hostile reactions.

Images of Turkey in the United States during the Gilded Age were generally not flattering. For the most part, Turks appeared in Gilded Age serious journals and popular press as “blood-thirsty,” “savages,” and “the most brutal outcasts of the human race,” who were merely “camping in Europe” – albeit for five hundred years – but not a part of it. A “pitiable imbecility” was said to characterize the Ottoman Empire, with the Turks having shown an “utter incapacity for just, enlightened, progressive government.” Looking at Turkey in 1877, an American army officer concluded that in order “to reform Turkey” it would be necessary first “to abolish the Turks.” At the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, according to historians Gail Bederman and Robert Rydell, the location of the Turkish village on the Midway clearly placed Turkey among the “barbarous” nations of the world; at the Turkish village, as Bederman puts it, “unmanly, dark-skinned men cajoled customers to shed their manly restraint and savor their countrywomen's sensuous dancing.” Even Mark Twain quipped that “I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little – not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.”

If for Russell Johnson the experience of teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey was that of being in a “not so strange land,” my four months as a Fulbright professor at the University of Alexandria in Egypt were often quite the opposite. There I was truly a stranger in a strange land. But it is important to note right from the start that by strange I mean foreign in the sense that American history of any sort is not part of the Egyptian university curriculum. So much so that before I arrived in Egypt I had been given only a hazy idea of what I might be teaching. Once there I quickly found that I had to jettison the proposal that I had submitted for the Fulbright competition – to teach about the processes and ideas of democracy in U.S. history, most especially in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The reasons for my inability to teach what I had proposed help explain much about the place of U.S. history, indeed all of “western” history, in Egyptian universities, and how the situation differs enormously from those described for Canada, Mexico, and Turkey. In these “post-eleventh September” days, it seems to me especially important to understand that while in the U.S. we seek to expand our university history curricula into a world vision, in Egypt exactly the opposite has been happening. Why this should be so in the age of globalization, and what lessons it has for U.S. historians, I think are among the valuable insights that can be gained from a Fulbright teaching fellowship in the Arab world.