There are two ways to write about the history of anti-Americanism. Until now, many scholars – the “anti-anti-Americans” – have taken the term at face value and assembled catalogues of published statements exhibiting animosity toward the United States. These histories often convey the impression of continuity, consistency, and consensus, so that in effect they present a single, transnational tradition of anti-Americanism. From Enlightenment philosophers deriding the New World's climate to Latin American nationalists blaming U.S. imperialism for all their countries’ ills, we are invited to contemplate an apparently unbroken chain of irrational hostility, an enduring ideological mindset with a long pedigree. Anti-Americanism, in the conventional approach, is understood as an obsessive and particular hatred of the United States, expressed in exaggerated language and traceable to a fundamental hostility toward democracy, freedom, and modernity.

This chapter differs. Instead of presenting a history of anti-Americanism as if the existence of such a phenomenon were self-evident, it places that assumption under the microscope and examines how the concept of anti-Americanism arose and evolved into a credo of unusual power. This chapter does not deny, by any means, that many people in many lands at many times have said or written ill-informed, derogatory, and even false and defamatory things about the United States. It does, however, ask us to rethink the imposition of the distorting lens that we call anti-Americanism, because the term itself is burdened with unhelpful myths.