Encounters are both the object and form of this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies. Edited by a historian and a literary scholar of the United States trained in France, this issue is designed as a place of encounter and simultaneously takes “encounter” as an analytical object in itself, specifically the articulation or dis-articulation between the disciplines of literature and history, the intersection between aesthetics and politics, and the dialogue between historical versions of the past and their literary reenactment. Away from the impasses of such binaries as textualism v. contextualism, historicism v. (new) formalism and presentism, this special issue rather speculates on contingent crossings, unsettling combinations which we understand not as the foundation of a new methodology but as a series of ad hoc responses to specific questions raised by specific texts and objects and the ways they are read today. In France, where the fault-line between the disciplines falls differently than in the United States, the encounter between history and literature has recently sparked new debates and provocative manifestos. This special issue of EJAS has found its impulse in these debates. We have asked French and American historians and literary scholars of the United States to read forms, objects, and texts that could be viewed as concrete crystallizations of the dialogue between literature as a mode of writing and institutional practice and history as a series of bygone events, narrative, and process. Attending to these objects that could be “both history and literature” (Jablonka), these essays revisit the American history of history and literature as disciplines. Because they are concrete attempts at reading across, they gesture towards a practice of literature and history as “interdisciplines” and incite us to think “out of the disciplinary box” today.