Any historian of the United States working in Europe may easily lose count of the number of times she is advised – by students, by colleagues, by friends and family, by complete strangers – that the history she studies is a short one. The observation is frequently accompanied by a wry smile; a short history, it is implied, therefore a simple history. And anyway, short or long, who needs to study it? Don't we all know it? Are we not all thoroughly imbued, or infected, depending on one's perspective, with American culture? Does it not permeate our lives through television, film, popular literature, the Internet? Are we not as familiar with American culture, with American politics, as we are with our own? Perhaps even more familiar; perhaps there is no culture anymore, beyond that refracted through American-dominated media and communications networks. We live in the global village, and the corner store is a 7-11. Is America not in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the music we listen to, and the Web we surf? America's history is already internationally inscribed. It is not just in the political landscape of the East Coast, the racially informed social landscape of the South, the reservation lands of the Dakotas, the borderlands of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. It is much bigger than that. It is a history frequently contorted through the entertainment industry that is Hollywood, encountered in the heritage industry built on Plymouth Rock, and, above all, commemorated first, in the national landscape at Valley Forge, Stone's River, and Gettysburg, and then the global one, at Aisne-Marne and Belleau Wood, near Omaha Beach, Normandy, and at Son My. Why go looking for America? Surely it is everywhere.