“Why Do They Dislike Us?” asked the New York Times. The year was 1913, the “they” were Canadians, and the Times thought it had the answer: “unreasoning animosity” and “jealousy.” It was not the first time the paper tried to explain to its baffled readers why there was resentment abroad toward what many considered “the best country in the world.” In 1899, the Times editorial “Why They Hate Us” asserted that foreign hostility lay in “envy” of our “political and social and industrial success.” The question would be asked again and again in the course of the twentieth century, and each time, the riddle was solved with the reassuring proclamation of foreign vice and American virtue.

Flash forward a century to a moment of national anguish. The horrifying attacks of September 11 were unprecedented in this country. Less new were the questions that followed. “Why do they hate us?” asked President George W. Bush in an address to Congress, the nation, and the world. He immediately provided his own answer: “they hate our freedoms.” This was followed by a wave of investigations – official, journalistic, and scholarly – into the distressing phenomenon of anti-Americanism. Since that calamitous day in 2001, more than 6000 newspaper articles have referred to “anti-Americanism.” A sampling of their headlines reads “Why the World Loves to Hate America,” “Anti-Americanism Is One ‘Ism’ That Thrives,” “An Irrational Hatred,” “Hating America, Hating Humanity.” The consensus that emerged largely reaffirmed what Americans have heard for a hundred years: foreigners are irrational and ill-informed about the best country in the world.