Throughout the twentieth century, journalists, politicians and academics have used the term ‘Americanization’ to assess the global impact of the USA’s rise to the status of a world power, and to make sense of the dramatic and bedazzling social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. European intellectuals have rarely resisted the temptation to use ‘America’ as shorthand for ‘modernity’: across the Atlantic, European observers believed, it was possible to learn and see what their own societies would look like in the future. Complaints about the Americanization of Europe – or the world – could easily be turned into outright anti-Americanism, i.e. a radical and reductionist ideology which made the USA responsible for all the ills of society, be they economic, political, or cultural. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the following rift in transatlantic relations gave the history of European perceptions of America a new impetus. Among the large number of studies devoted to the history of ‘Americanization’ and anti-Americanism that have been published in recent years, several monographs, based on original research, promise new insights and deserve close attention
