Two new books represent the latest attack by today’s historians on the venerable concept of American exceptionalism. The word that appears in both titles signals the authors’ goal: Charles Maier, in “Among Empires” (Harvard University Press, 368 pages, $27.95), and Thomas Bender, in “A Nation Among Nations” (Hill and Wang, 373 pages, $26). Each insists that we should think about the United States as just one example, “among” many others, of broader historical phenomena. For Mr. Maier, the phenomenon in question is empire, and the America of 2006 is best understood by comparing it to earlier powers like Rome, Britain, and Ottoman Turkey. For Mr. Bender, not just the present but the whole American past is at stake. Since 1492, he argues, every major development in the New World has been bound up with global trends in politics and economics, so that the American story cannot be told without constant reference to Europe and Asia.

That these books should appear at the same time is not just a coincidence. For both Messrs. Maier and Bender, the adoption of a comparative perspective on American history is a polemical choice, meant to influence the way readers think about America’s place in the world. In an age of American superpower,when the United States’ attitude toward treaties, alliances, and international institutions has been highly conflicted, Messrs. Maier and Bender hope to convince their readers that America cannot “go it alone,” and indeed never has. Mr. Bender says explicitly that he wants to “encourage and sustain a cosmopolitan citizenry, at once proud nationals and humble citizens of the world”; Mr. Maier asks whether “we have the wisdom to prove to the rest of the world … that we are not just preoccupied with power for power’s sake.” Yet ironically, like most claims to eliminate the American exception, these books end up reinforcing it. After reading Messrs. Bender and Maier, it is the differences between the United States and other nations that stand out, much more than the similarities.

“A Nation Among Nations” is, in scope at least, the more ambitious of the two books. Mr. Bender declares in his introduction that his goal is nothing less than “to mark the end of American history as we have known it.” That history is conventionally taught, in schools and popular bestsellers, as a self-contained story, in which the progress of the United States is only occasionally affected by events outside its borders. If Mr. Bender has his way, this provincialism will be overthrown: “we need a history that understands national history as itself being made in and by histories that are both larger and smaller than the nation’s.” His book demonstrates that principle in action: It is made up of five extended essays, each taking on an important chapter of American history and retelling it with an emphasis on its international dimensions.

Yet despite his fire-breathing manifesto, Mr. Bender’s actual interpretations of American history are less groundbreaking than he claims. Perhaps high school students would be surprised to learn that the culture of colonial America was more Atlantic than Continental in orientation; or that the liberal-nationalist revolutions of 1848 affected the ideology of the new Republican Party; or that early-20th-century Progressives took their cues from reformers in Germany. But none of these ideas will come as any surprise to readers of Alan Taylor, Sean Wilentz, or other serious, accessible historians. In fact, “A Nation Among Nations” does not so much revolutionize the way we think about American history as consolidate changes that have been building for many years. By the end of the book, when Mr. Bender writes that “American history has been significantly shaped by its global context,” the end of history as we know it has come to sound more like a truism.

Mr. Maier’s book is more narrowly focused, but also more thought-provoking. “Among Empires” is oddly constructed, opening with a theoretical, comparative essay on the nature of empire, only to swerve, in its second half, into a detailed but basically familiar account of the beginning of the Cold War. The justification for this exercise seems to be that the years after 1945 established the DNA of the American empire that has come to maturity today; but the connection between the minutiae of the Marshall Plan and Mr. Maier’s overall argument is never sufficiently clear.

It is the book’s first chapters, with Mr. Maier’s sketch of the recurring features of empire, that will attract the most attention and debate. Empires, Mr. Maier argues, do not just acquire territory abroad; they inevitably transform their societies at home. Being an empire and having an empire,to use his terminology, are closely related: “[T]he structures and inequalities of empire recapitulate themselves at all levels of international, national, and local activity.” Mr. Maier’s most important insight is that empires often make use of genuinely attractive ideas to support their pretensions to power. By claiming to represent peace and civilization, Rome won the allegiance of local elites from Britain to Africa, and sometimes actually deserved it.

But none of Mr. Maier’s criteria really fits the United States,if only because the United States does not seek territorial expansion, surely the sine qua non of any empire. Only by the most tortuous analogy can the U.S. invasion of Iraq be called, as Mr. Maier calls it, an “imperial” war designed to pacify a “frontier.” Rather, the Iraq war rested on the belief that U.S.interests are best served by the spread of a liberal order, or at least of a stable, nonviolent one, which specifically precludes territorial conquest. There can be no doubt, of course, that the United States, like every other polity that has ever existed, uses its power to advance its own interests. The unusual and significant point is that, since 1945, it has generally done this in a way that also advances the world’s common interest. As Mr. Maier reminds us despite himself, there are other ways of exercising power, even great power, than through empire. This, too, is part of the American exception.

akirsch@nysun.com