Outside In

For around twenty years scholars have been seeking to reform the nation-state-oriented approach to the history of the United States. In the 1990s, this emerged in the form of ‘internationalising’ US history; from the early 2000s, this folded into the transnational turn that swept across many fields of modern history. Offering a collection of chapters from a range of leading scholars, this book seeks to provide a snapshot of the cumulative impact of these projects, and in so doing to reveal ‘the ways in which the history of the modern United States can be reconceived internationally and transnationally’ (p. 3). As the editors of this collection (Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow) note, for some time both the internationalising and transnationalising projects were heavy on theory but light on practice. This collection, by contrast, seeks to offer ‘detailed empirical and historiographical work’ (p. 7), and indeed most of the contributions emerge from weighty research published elsewhere. The editors have also taken a deliberately open approach to their key concepts, not seeking to isolate the various forms of internationalising US history from each other, nor strictly to separate the study of transnationalism from the history of the nation-state. And contributors are not bound to any rigid terminology: Minkah Makalani, for example, in a chapter on international black radicalism, argues that ‘transnationalism’ does not move far enough away from the nation as the central referent being transcended. (Given that the study of transnationalism has been repeatedly attacked precisely for moving too far from the state, this is perhaps a sign of how far the understanding of the term has changed.) For him, diaspora offers a superior frame for his subjects, because it ‘does not emerge from a national homeland, nor is the nation-state necessarily a goal’ (p. 185)

Historiography · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Terminology · Transnationalism · World history · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society