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Articles
The Nation and Beyond: A Special Issue
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Transnational Perspectives on United States History
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by David Thelen
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Envisioning Transnational History
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The Nationalization of Nature
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Current disputes among American historians over the fragmentation of the
discipline pit local or regional against national histories or, as in this
issue, transnational against national histories. The debates have often been
sterile, Richard White argues, because historians do not
recognize space and scale as central issues. They talk past each other, some
citing problems best studied locally and others citing problems calling for a
national or global field of vision. White recommends inquiry about the scales
appropriate to different historical investigations, the trade-offs in any choice
of scale, and the production of space itself: in history through social practice
and in the practice of historians as they frame their projects.
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Clio in Words and in Motion: Practices of Narrating the Past
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Should historians fear the medium of film? Bruno Ramirez demonstrates how his experiences as filmmaker and academic historian sensitized him to hidden pathways in the lives of his subjects. Writing screenplays, Ramirez contends, freed him from the rigid, rationalistic methods that stifle fluid, immediate, "narrative understandings" of the past. He explains how his writing on migration history attained transnational and transcultural dimensions, as he focused on the lives of individuals who crossed boundaries and reshaped cultures. Ramirez urges academic historians to employ storytelling, filmmaking, and other narrative techniques that, he hopes, can increase their impact on society's historical culture.
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Ways of Writing Transnational History
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Making Nations / Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire
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As an Australian scholar, Ian Tyrrell has gravitated toward transnational perspectives on American history. Here he throws new light on the transnational origins of American academic historiography. Rather than typecast Frederick Jackson Turner as an exponent of an American uniqueness forged on the frontier, he shows Turner and other American academic historians of the early twentieth century advocating comparative and transnational approaches even as they championed histories focused on the nation. To explain the apparent contradiction, Tyrrell describes how transnational perspectives, which at first prospered, were marginalized as the relationship between professional historians and the American nation-state changed during the twentieth century.
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"But a Local Phase of a World Problem": Black History's Global Vision
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Robin D. G. Kelley suggests that earlier generations of African American historians had begun to internationalize American history a century ago. He argues that their understanding of the global dimensions of the "Negro"--and hence the whole American--experience were fundamentally shaped by their search for alternative political models outside the United States. The essay focuses on scholars working on the history of the United States. But, Kelley believes, historians should look for--and would find--similar approaches in the study of black people in other disciplines (such as anthropology and sociology) and among scholars in other countries of the diaspora.
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Transnationalizing American Labor History
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Labor history has often ignored the transnational traditions of the labor movement. Much labor historiography displays methodological nationalism, with strict separation between studies of different nations, Marcel van der Linden argues. His article helps us recapture a sense of workers' transnational struggles and of class loyalty as an alternative to national identity. He surveys the recent outpouring of work on transnational labor history and documents both parallels in the experience of the working classes in different countries and cross-border interactions among workers. Reflecting on theoretical and methodological issues, he suggests directions a transnational American labor history might take.
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Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America
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To historians of early modern North America, the nation-state has rarely seemed the right unit of study. Nicholas Canny evaluates experiments with other units--from works of the imperial school in the 1920s to community studies in the 1970s to interpretations of the colonies as extensions of early modern Britain. Juxtaposing historiography with vignettes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lives that stretched across oceans and borders, Canny explains why many scholars now call themselves historians of the Atlantic world. The article suggests what the Atlantic history of the future might be and explains the merits of Atlantic history, as opposed to global history, for the early modern centuries.
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Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History
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The United States has not been the only, or always the most attractive, "nation of immigrants," Donna R. Gabaccia observes. Comparing Italian migrants in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, Gabaccia shows how concepts of globalization, diaspora, internationalism, and transnationalism come into play on the familiar territory of social history. She highlights the ordinariness of migration. For many people, past and present, life has taken place on geographical scales "below" and "above" that of the nation-state. Transnational history, she suggests, requires collaborative research and critical use of such concepts as diaspora; in the twentieth century, even the most migratory people rarely evaded the power of nation-states to confine and define them.
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Transformations across Borders
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America and the European Sense of History
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Europeans' efforts to make sense of America in the twentieth century constitute a special chapter in the European history of ideas, Rob Kroes argues. Often there has been an existential urgency to that effort: Analysis of America as a counterpoint forms part of reflections on Europe's history and destiny. Kroes untangles the intricate relations among responses to the cultural difference presented by America. He links elites' uneasy meditations on the plight of Europe and its nation-states in the years between the world wars with non-elites' post-World War II incorporation of American popular culture into their sense of self and of history.
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Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1940s
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How were the modern, seemingly universal versions of such concepts as race, society, state, progress, people, and nation created? Mauricio Tenorio Trillo turns to the history of social science to elucidate the common, global categories that organize contemporary historical thought. As he explores the interaction of social scientists from Mexico and the United States between 1880 and 1920, he advances an approach to the history of science that goes beyond conventional national frameworks. From the mutual gaze of Mexican and American scholars in that era, he suggests, emerged a redefinition of race.
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Le Melting-Pot: Made in America, Produced in France
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National traditions are nowhere more evident than in writing about the transnational topic of migration, Nancy L. Green shows. After examining the meanings of the "melting pot" in the United States, she explores how French scholars and politicians have debated American definitions of American immigration history and used them to interpret the history of immigration to France and French national identity. The use of American history abroad is a form of transnational history. But the French mirror is also a magnifying glass. Although it may exaggerate the faults of the United States, it can prod thinking on universalism and multiple identities.
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Frontier Myths and Their Applications in America and Israel: A Transnational Perspective
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Both the United States and Israel began with Europeans establishing themselves on frontiers. The differences between those frontiers shaped contrasting founding myths--one individualist, the other collectivist. S. Ilan Troen examines efforts by Americans and Israelis to learn from each others' experiences. From failed attempts to export homesteading from the Middle West to the Middle East in the 1920s to the idealization of Israel as a foil to American greed and individualism after World War II to recent Israeli praise of privacy and private property, Americans' and Israelis' mutual inspection suggests that transnational history may uncover both the difficulty of transplanting ideas and institutions and commonalities.
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The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States
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How are we to understand the seemingly ubiquitous references to human rights at the close of the twentieth century? Most scholarship on human rights in the 1970s centers on the Carter administration. Kenneth Cmiel suggests that we instead look at the growth of nongovernmental organizations and pre-Carter legislation to explain why human rights politics persists to the present. The human rights activism of the 1970s is best understood less as a stage in the Cold War than as an emerging strand of late-twentieth-century globalization.
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Revisting the United States as a Nation-State
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In the Nation's Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era
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During the Great Depression, American advocates of social insurance refused to follow the lead of Europeans. The Social Security Act of 1936 tied old age and unemployment insurance to wage work, not, as elsewhere, to residence or citizenship. Why? Alice Kessler-Harris finds the explanation in loyalty to a Jeffersonian concept of manly independence. To uphold traditional gender roles, American policies protected white male household heads--at the cost of the autonomy of white married women and the interests of African Americans. Kessler-Harris uses a transnational perspective to reveal latent meanings of a familiar American episode and to explore the power of race and gender in transforming imported institutions and ideas.
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Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism
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Gary Gerstle uses the thought and politics of Theodore Roosevelt to explore contradictions within American nationalism. Roosevelt's nationalism expressed itself as a combative racial ideology that thrived on aggression and the vanquishing of savage peoples-and as a civic tradition promising Americans the same rights regardless of color, religion, or sex. Roosevelt usually found ways to reconcile his commitments to the racial and civic nationalist traditions. But sometimes he could not pack both into the national identity he was laboring to create. At such moments, we glimpse how even the most ardent nationalists could find the nation too limiting for their personal aspirations.
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Book Reviews
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A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Movie Reviews
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Great American Speeches, by Stephen Lucas
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery, by Herbert Aptheker
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
A Midwife's Tale, by Charlotte G. Borst
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Liberty! The American Revolution, by Joanne Freeman
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, by Harry W. Fritz
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, by Dennis Reinhartz
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
The U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848, by Joseph G. Dawson III
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
The U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848, by James M. McCaffrey
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Rebel Hearts: Sarah & Angelina Grimke and the Anti-Slavery Movement, by Wendy Hamand Venet
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
The Irish in America: The Long Journey Home; and May the Road Rise to Meet You: The Irish-American Experience, by Janet Nolan
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
America's Victoria: The Victoria Woodhull Story, by Ann D. Gordon
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
'Remember the Maine': The Roots of the Spanish-American War; and The Spanish-American War: A Conflict in Progress, by John M. Dobson
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
America 1900, by Roy Rosenzweig
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Alone on Ice: The Story of Admiral Richard Byrd, by Morgan Sherwood
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Rescue at Sea, by Paul B. Israel
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
From Danger to Dignity: The Fight for Safe Abortion, by Amy Kesselman
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
The Thin Red Line, by Allan R. Millett
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
George C. Marshall: Soldier and Statesman, by R. Alton Lee
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
General Douglas MacArthur, by Stanley L. Falk
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
The G.I. Bill: The Law That Changed America, by Rupert Wilkinson
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Race for the Superbomb, by Lawrence Badash
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Roy Cohn: Joseph McCarthy's Right-Hand Man, by T. Michael Ruddy
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Martin Luther King Jr.: The Man and the Dream, by Thomas J. Davis
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958-1959, by Johanna Miller Lewis
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Bay of Pigs, by Keith Eubank
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
A Walk on the Moon; and The 1960s, by Bob Miller
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Dick, by Scott A. Sandage
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins, by Robert Freeman Smith
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Sam Walton: Bargain Billionaire, by Alan Raucher
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Jimmy Carter: To the White House and Beyond, by E. Stanly Godbold Jr.
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
Summer of Sam, by David Farber and Beth Bailey
[Full-text at the historycoop.org]
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Letters to the Editor
Announcements
Recent Scholarship
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On the cover:
In New York City in 1880, a coalition of radical labor groups commemorates the ninth anniversary
of the Paris Commune. Courtesy Collection International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
See Marcel van der Linden, "Transnationalizing American Labor History."
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