Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada, by Robert Bothwell

Published date01 June 2017
DOI10.1177/0020702017707501
Date01 June 2017
Subject MatterBook Reviews
International Journal
2017, Vol. 72(2) 279–294
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702017707501
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Book Reviews
Robert Bothwell
Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 432pp. $38.50 (cloth)
ISBN: 978–0–19–544880–1
Reviewed by: Stephen Azzi, Carleton University
Seldom have Canadaand the United States seemed as far apart as they have in recent
months. In January, Donald Trump’s administration banned visitors from Syria and
six other Muslim-majority countries. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose govern-
ment had already welcomed 40,000 Syrian refugee s, responded by reaf‌f‌irming
Canada’s commitment to diversity and to accepting refugees regardless of their
faith—a position shared by prominent politicians across the Canadian political spec-
trum. The Canadiangovernment remainscommitted to a carbon tax, in starkcontrast
with Trump, who has said that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese.
Canada’s primeminister has declared himselfto be a feminist; the American president
has a dif‌ferent view of women’s rights. For scholars of the Canadian–American rela-
tionship, the challenge today is an acute version of the perennial one: to understand
broad historicaltrends without projecting contemporary anxieties onto the past.Few
Canadian historians do this better than Robert Bothwell.
Bothwell’s 25th book, My Country, Your Country: A Unif‌ied History of the
United States and Canada, is dif‌f‌icult to describe. It is not a history of Canada–
US relations, although it of‌fers countless insights on that subject. Nor is it, as the
title suggests, a combined history of Canada and the United States. Rather, it is an
ambitious and far-reaching examination of those events and trends that illuminate
the character of each country.
Bothwell’s transnational approach allows him to dismantle many of the assump-
tions that have underpinned Canadian and American historiography. Canadian
nationalists, particularly since the 1960s, have seen the two countries as profoundly
dif‌ferent from each other. American exceptionalists have insisted that their country
is unique, simply ignoring the presence of a profoundly similar nation on the US’s
northern frontier. Even those American scholars who have compared their country
to Canada, such as Seymour Martin Lipset, have done so to prove the exceptional
nature of the United States. Both Canadian and American historians have ignored
developments outside their own country. When they were able to see beyond the
border, they exaggerated the dif‌ferences in order to serve their national purposes, in
the process both shaping the historiography and distorting the history.

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