ABSTRACT
The skepticism toward the progressive interpretation of history and the current ambiguities of the interpretations of progressivism in history are surely signs of the common process. For America, European history as written by Americans has serviced the gradual ascent from the known to the unknown and has been therefore one of the channels that have led Americans from their inward preoccupations toward the understanding of the world at large. The discipline of European history, with its blend of the familiar and the exotic, has thus been a stepping stone to the confrontation of the still more exotic cultures that have challenged Americans since the war. More important, however, the very act of historical knowledge requires, from the American historian of Europe, a set of common concepts that is closer to the level of universality, and there with of principle, than is that of the historian of the United States.
