Just picked up The Cousins' Wars from Barnes & Noble, and there's a bit in the Foreword that really jumped out at me:
These pages are aimed at both British and American audiences, a challenge in itself. Any American has read British books that confuse the Dakotas and very few Americans could draw a decent county-by-county map of Britain (especially since the old boundaries have been changed to make way for fakes like Avon and Cleveland). The confusion of Bridgwater, Bridgnorth, Bridport makes it all too clear how British writers can mix up the various Springfields and Middletowns. These of course, are only the tip of the interpretive iceberg. With rare exceptions, we have all grown up thinking either British or American. Very few think biculturally, even if we have spent several years on the other side. You can see it in the history books. Americans generally only do British history in short, manageable chronological chunks. And although dozens of British-born historians are presently at US universities (not least Yale), most of their output continues to be about Britain. Which is all well and good, since for at least a hundred million Americans, the British Isles are the Old Country.
The drawback is that the reverse is not true. How many British and Irish see the United States/Canada/Australia/New Zealand as the New Country? By this, I mean the current principal entity charged with our common economic, cultural, and political interest: to keep much of the rest of the world speaking English, the lingua anglica of global communications, for the twenty-first century? Some Britons look to the New Country, to be sure -- certainly the million or two who are increasingly transatlantic. But my use of the term "Anglo-America" is probably more wish than hard analysis. Too few Americans and Britons have looked at their histories with a mind to pursue the extraordinary interrelations of these two nations.
One of the major thrusts of the book is the extent to which the American Revolution and the US Civil War can be viewed as the later acts of the English Civil War and how the regional and religious sectionalisms that were prominent in all three wars (to the extent that they substantially fueled the flames) have shaped things on both sides of the Atlantic. It is, for instance, forgotten the extent to which certain portions of England openly supported the colonials in the American Revolution... indeed, had one taken polls, it's quite likely that solid majorities of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Lincolnshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire supported the rebels. This isn't that surprising when you consider that most of the early New Englanders hailed from within 50 miles of Groton, Suffolk.
