Transnational History

Daniel Story  

I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. This is episode 12. Back in 2006, the AHR published a conversation on transnational history, which brought together six well established historians around this newly popular approach to discuss its promises and its limitations. It’s still one of the journal’s most downloaded articles. But nearly two decades later, where does transnational history stand? How far hasn’t come in what remains to be done? In an effort to tackle some of those questions? Columbia historian Paul Chamberlain convened a forum on Transnational history for the March 2023 issue. In it 12, up and coming scholars from a variety of historical focuses weigh in on what transnational history means for their own work, the impacts they believe this approach has had over previous decades, and what opportunities and challenges are still on the horizon. Three of those contributors, Rebecca Herman, Maria John, and Hussein Fancy, each spoke with History in Focus producer, Conor Howard. We’ll hear from them through the course of the episode. But to begin, I talk with Paul Chamberlain, about how the forum came together. And more fundamentally, what it now means to study transnational history.

Daniel Story  

In your sort of best cocktail party parlance—In other words, for the non initiated—how would you begin to define transnational history? And maybe not just what it is, but kind of what makes it a compelling arena of history to work in.

Paul Chamberlain  

Transnational history is a development that took place in the field of academic history, really, there are vestiges of it that go back a long time, but its really in the 90s and 2000s, I think there was a recognition on the part of a lot of scholars that the sort of questions they were asking, and the sort of work that they were doing, really transcended the boundaries of the nation state. These scholars also recognized that the discipline tended to be very closely connected to national history. And you know, that has to do with the way that the discipline of history developed in the 19th and 20th century, in a way that that was very much rooted in national identity, national experiences, and just the project of the nation state. One of the things that I think comes out in the history lab is just the very broad range of different ways that historians approach transnational history and the way that you can you can take transnational history, and they’re all utilizing transactional history in a different way.

Daniel Story  

Yeah. So maybe let’s look a little more closely at this history lab piece. Do you mind telling me a little bit about how it came together?

Paul Chamberlain  

So I had, I’d written another piece that was more closely focused on the field of foreign relations, and the state of efforts to internationalize the field and to bring in more of sort of transnational type work into the field of foreign relations history. I showed it to mark Bradley, who’s the editor of the the AHR, and he suggested that a different version of this might work well in this sort of history lab format. He pointed out the fact that the 2006 conversation on Transnational history remains one of the journal’s top downloaded articles. We both just in the course of this conversation, arrived at this idea that it would it would be really interesting to update that conversation, right? Because that’s 16 years ago. It’s still clearly it’s a very relevant piece. But we’re in a very different place now than we were in 2006. The transnational turn has turned the field has, has gone from a position where transnational history was something that was new and exciting, to a place where it has natural history is just widely accepted and everyone’s familiar with it. We thought it would be interesting to bring together a group of primarily younger scholars, there’s a few mid career folks who are in the mix to talk about what transnational history means to them. And what they understand transnational history to have done in the discipline and in their separate fields. Right. I think one of the reasons why this is interesting is that in that first piece that that came out in 2006, these were primarily established historians. They were people who had, I think, by and large, been trained to work within these more traditional geographic, national historiographies. And then they had moved into transnational history. The scholars that we’re bringing in are people that finish their degrees at a time when the transnational turn is already taking place. Right, right. So as I said, it’s no longer novel, it’s no longer new. And I think they have a very different perspective on these things. And so we saw this as an opportunity to have a discussion with these people to sort of check in on the state of transnational history, in its more mature form, and to ask a younger generation, what they thought remains to be done with transnational history.

Daniel Story  

And you’ve assembled a really cool mix of people and in terms of the perspectives that they come from, and the types of history that they do. So let’s say readers have this issue of the AHR in front of them, they find your forum, they encounter your introduction, and then they dive into the individual contributions, what are they going to find there.

Paul Chamberlain  

So it came out that a lot of these pieces are very personal, which is cool. I think the more kind of informal structure of the history lab lends itself to to allowing the contributors to really dive into the ways that their personal lives have had an impact on their research. And I think this is especially pronounced because we were putting this together at a time when everyone was coming back to work after being isolated at home during the pandemic. And this was an experience that was interesting for for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, these are transnational, international and global historians that are witnessing before their eyes, this species level event, an event that we know is going to have historical resonance for decades and decades, probably centuries to come. So we were watching all that unfold as international transaction historians. At the same time, we were doing it at home, right, and we were doing it in a situation where the boundary between work and life had been completely broken down. The pandemic really collapsed the divisions between work and life in interesting ways. And I think that shows up in the essays, I think another thing that people will find is that we did our best to bring together a group of scholars that were working across a very broad chronological and thematic range. And one of the things that struck me is that the transactional history was deeply relevant for all of these people. It was an approach to scholarship that resonated across all of these different periods, across all of these different thematic dimensions of what people were doing. And in all of these different regions.

Rebecca Herman  

My name is Rebecca Herman. I’m an assistant professor in the history department at UC Berkeley. When Paul invited me to contribute to the forum, I thought it sounded like a great idea. It’s something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I’m not trained as a global historian. I think the way he framed it was this was a forum that was about global history or about work that transcends traditional boundaries. And I certainly identify with the second way of describing it, but I’ve had been trying to think about what is my relationship to global history? Do I have claims to global history do I think of myself as a global historian? And so it was a fun piece to think about, particularly at that particular moment in my career, because I was finishing my first book, I think, maybe I had just sent it to my editor, and was gonna have to start thinking about putting together a tenure file. So I was thinking about what my journey has been, like my kind of intellectual development. So I had been thinking a lot about this. And it was really cathartic to sit down and think about those things in writing. The piece moves between talking a little bit about how I came to the project that I had just completed, the issues that I ran into in regards to scale and scope, which I think are issues that anyone who’s thinking about global history encounters. I talk a lot about what my experience having trained in a particular geographically defined field, how that training shaped the sort of work that I do and the way that I think about global history. And then it even I think at one point kind of steers in the direction of teaching a little bit.

Conor Howard  

So I’m interested in as a Latin Americanist how, I guess that aspect of your training, perhaps prepared you or maybe even predisposed you in some ways for thinking transnationally?

Rebecca Herman  

Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting question. You know, teaching the survey class on the intro to Latin American history, for example, I mean, it forces you to be an international historian, whether you set out to be one or not, the region is, as you know, huge and diverse. And in 14 weeks, there’s just no way to tell a coherent narrative about Latin America as a place. And so you have to kind of pause and you know, on day one, think about what is a region? Why is this a region? Why do we think of it as a coherent space and kind of get the students thinking in that way, and introducing a set of problems that you can be reflecting on over the course of the semester, since you’re not going to just deliver for them a neat and tidy narrative that encapsulates the history of the entire region? So we are, you know, taught from the beginning to teach really broadly and and that requires thinking at all different levels of scale, you have to think about what are the narratives that do hold more or less consistent across the region? How do they differ between places? So you’re thinking comparatively as well? What are the stories that can tie different parts of the region together, so then you start thinking transnationally, about the movement of people or goods or commodities. And it just naturally lends itself to reflection on the different frameworks that historians use to tell about the past. You know, within Latin American history programs, there’s also less now but there was once upon a time, I think, an expectation that you would grapple with the breadth of the region by burrowing down into one national area of expertise. If the most common path was for a historian to become an expert on a specific country, and then your scholarship moving forward would focus on that country. I mean, the other thing I’ll say about Latin American history, as it relates to global and transnational history is that I think because of where Latin American countries tend to sit in a global pecking order, there is a quicker assumption that the world and what happens in it, and what happens elsewhere, matters to Latin American history. And so within Latin American history, I think there’s sort of a well, obviously, transnational connections matter, obviously, what’s going on globally matters. And I think a really important development in the field has been for Latin American is to think not just about how the global context has shaped history locally and nationally, but also how Latin American actors have shaped global history. And that is a really burgeoning area of scholarship currently.

Conor Howard  

Interesting. I think that can segue into another point that you raised that I was I found really interesting is one of the common features of whatever level you’re working at transnational or local, or what have you, is the importance of hierarchies and dynamics of power. So I guess, if you could speak a little bit to power as a transnational construct, I really liked your quote, There is nothing particularly magical that happens when you transcend the nation’s borders, you simply encounter still further layers and manifestations of hierarchy there. I really liked that.

Rebecca Herman  

Yeah, I think I spend a lot of time thinking because in our graduate program, we’ve been trying to decide should we have a global and international track around the global international field, do we still want to remain as wedded to geographically defined field as we’ve always been one of the pros and cons of training in a specific geographically defined field. And so it’s something that I’ve thought about from all these different perspectives, right, as a student, as a faculty member, as a graduate advisor. And I think that I just keep coming back around to the fact that training is a Latin Americanist, my way of thinking about the past is so informed by work on the modern period that exists within national frameworks, and that which transcends it, so it’s not at international history speaks more to me and how I think about the world than folks who, for example, write about the history of Brazil, focusing only on Brazil. I think that in a lot of ways, the 20th century scholarship on Latin America, whether it’s framed internationally or not really fundamentally shaped how I think about power. And so the point I was trying to make there is that it’s a field that has been really dedicated to trying to make sense of hierarchy from all these different perspectives, right gender, race class, and the analytic skills that have gone into that really amazing work don’t change or disappear when you start thinking transnational internationally, you just apply them at a different scale or from a different perspective. I guess what I’m finding us that I keep coming back around to the continued value of training deeply in a region if for no other reason, then it gives you a way to orient yourself when you’re diving more deeply into a particular kind of scholarship. Part of it also By from, I’m realizing something about my perspective that is significant in how I think about this is that I think I say in the piece somewhere, I’m really interested in international questions, but I am in my heart a social historian. And so that means I’m interested in relationships between people, and all of the different kinds of things that might shape those relationships. And so that’s going to be true whether you know, borders, or nationality or citizenship or foreign policy, that’s just a whole nother set of factors that might be brought to bear on relationships between people. Whereas if I was sort of more of a true international historian in the sense of focusing on that high political level, more exclusively, that intellectual connections that I feel to the really rich social and cultural history, written by Latin Americanists might not be as strong.

Paul Chamberlain  

One of the other things that surprised me in the essays was the degree of frustration that most of the contributors voiced toward this sense that even though they were engaged in this project of transnational history, they found themselves being pulled back toward more traditional, regional historiographies. That, you know, despite the fact that the discipline as a whole has, I think, largely embraced the idea of transnational scholarship, there was this very strong tendency to just try to push people back into older, more established geographic fields.

Daniel Story  

Institutional pressures, and the like?

Paul Chamberlain  

I think that’s part of it. I think that’s a big part of it. But I think there’s also there’s, there’s a certain amount of pressure that comes from existing scholarly fields as well, which is something that I talked a bit about in my contribution. There’s also just the reality that despite the fact that the discipline has really encouraged transnational scholarship, at least on a theoretical level, it’s been difficult for people to pull off. And I think it speaks to the durability of the nation state, in shaping the way that historians engage with their research. Archives are usually, you know, administered by nation states, or, you know, many of the largest ones are. Scholarship and the historiography that we’re intervening in, is still very much broken up into these, these national frameworks. And the training that a lot of us received is still very rooted in nation state frameworks. I found that that most of the contributors, gave voice to some of these frustrations. And these are definitely things that I feel in my own work as well. So you know, people like Rebecca Herman, for instance, talks about feeling like a sort of misfit in her own field. And this is a common sentiment, Maria John, another contributor, finds that her research made her and these are her words, “a strange sort of Americanist.”

Maria John  

My name is Maria John, and I’m an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. I’m also the director of our Native American and Indigenous Studies, minor. I teach mostly in Native American history and public history. But my research is sort of comparative and transnational in scope. And I look at the 20th and 21st century histories of Indigenous Health activism in both the US and Australia, I was incredibly flattered to sort of receive the invitation to contribute a piece to this to this forum, it was really nice to have an explicit sort of opportunity to talk about my methodology as a historian who considers their work to be sort of transnational and comparative in scope. And I also really appreciated the the sort of invitation to write this piece in a kind of more personal mode, if you like. It’s not often that we get to do that. And so to think about one’s own journey, in this methodology, and to use that as a kind of inflection point and think about how the field has maybe changed, and you know, what some points of sort of departure might be, you know, within our own work, as that field has shifted, was a really exciting opportunity. So I tried to use the piece to sort of chart my own course, if you like, as I began, as a master student, and the work that I was doing there that sort of set me on the path of thinking comparatively, as a historian,

Conor Howard  

I kind of want to talk about this idea of professional or academic identities. I think you describe yourself as sort of an “odd sort of Americanist?” Would you like to speak maybe a little bit about being an Americanist who’s working in a transnational space or as an Australianist who’s working in a transnational space?

Maria John  

Yeah, thanks, Conor. I appreciate the question. And I appreciate the way you ask it as well, because, you know, sort of first draft of this piece I think that’s what I had actually titled the essay. I think I called it “A Strange Sort of Americanist.” And so it’s, it’s really gratifying to me that that sort of piece of it sort of jumped out at you. Because I do think that that that has very much been a part of my journey through, you know, through my kind of academic career here in the US. One of the reasons I wanted to sort of draw attention to this in the essay is because I think it does speak to some of the methodological sort of challenges that people doing this work, especially in the kind of early stages of one’s career sort of face up against and talk about some of the the sort of structural challenges that a researcher can face in these respects, you know, trying to figure out where they fit in exactly, and how that kind of plays out and the sort of opportunities that you’re able to take advantage of, and in some cases, not. So for myself, I think I had applied to PhD programs in sort of different modes, if you like, because it was hard at that time, from Australia to think, with a great deal of clarity about, you know, how I would be legible to an American university. And so, I did apply to some places under the quote unquote, international history track. But for the vast majority of the applications that I submitted, I did apply to be a part of the kind of US history cohort. And I think in trying to kind of articulate my research project and make myself legible, I very early found that it was, it was quite difficult to quite know how to, quote unquote, pitch myself. And I think that was, that was a challenge that sort of never went away. In some senses. When I was applying for funding as a graduate student, or grants or things like this, it was never quite clear to me whether I should apply as somebody, you know, doing an American history with a twist. Or whether I was somebody you know, that could justifiably cast themselves as somebody that was doing sort of international history, that label never kind of felt quite right to me. And I think that’s, that’s in part because, as I explained in the essay, you know, whilst I do fully sort of embrace this idea of transnational history, in my methodology, I’m still very much steeped in the national histories of the US, and Australia. And it’s hard to sort of cast oneself as an internationalist, when you are sort of really dealing with the archives of, you know, national history so explicitly as well as their historiographies.

Conor Howard  

Sort of a follow up on this, this challenge of finding a space of finding a way to describe yourself in graduate applications was it’s also a challenge when you’re entering the job market?

Maria John  

Yeah, yeah, no, I’d love to speak about this, because I think I mean, increasingly, you know, I think we have to think really creatively about how we, and I hate to use this word, but I think there’s sort of no escaping it, but how we kind of market ourselves, you know, when we’re kind of out there on the job market. And I think, for me, what made things clear and what sort of solidified things for me when I was thinking about the sorts of jobs that I wanted to apply for, and how I really wanted to sort of position myself was to think about the kind of teaching that I wanted to do. And, you know, I think when I started thinking about it from that perspective, it really did become clear to me that I did want to find myself in a history department or in a sort of interdisciplinary space that would sort of welcome a historian, because I’m very much steeped in the the sort of critical conversations and the sort of theoretical challenges that are posed by the more kind of interdisciplinary spaces of Indigenous Studies, American Studies, but I’m very much a kind of historian in my methodology, and I’m very sort of wedded to the historical project. So I definitely thought about how I wanted to position myself with with those things in mind. And with that being the case, you know, it did make sense to me that I should apply for for jobs that were looking for somebody that could, like, you know, teach a kind of native history survey, let’s say for example, and I’m lucky, you know, that’s, that’s the kind of position that I ended up with here at UMass Boston.

Daniel Story  

Any other sort of particular contributions that you want to call out or even do a little sort of whistlestop tour through the list of contributors?

Paul Chamberlain  

Sure. So one of our other contributors Laleh Khalili provides, I think, a very interesting perspective as someone that is doing work that is very relevant to international and transnational historians, but she herself does not consider herself a historian. She also laments these sort of artificial separations between anthropologists and sociologists and historians and political scientists. Raven Jimenez in her piece talks about using transactional history and, and using Historical Linguistics as a way to unravel some of the questions of transnational history in her own research. Arunabh Ghosh, in his piece talks about the growing challenges that many scholars face in doing work in the People’s Republic of China, as changing geopolitical circumstances and political circumstances in China itself, has led to a crackdown on civil society and archival access in that country. Hussein Fancy his piece really delves deeply into many of the challenges that come with trying to produce international and transnational history, working in multiple languages, working at multiple scales, working, you know, across multiple disciplines and sources, you know, he kind of talks about the need to be both a fox and a hedgehog in doing this sort of work.

Hussein Fancy  

My name is Hussein Fancy. I’m an associate professor at Yale University. At the core of what I do, I’m a medieval historian, but I work on Latin and Arabic, I work on Spain and North Africa, which has drawn me always into into two worlds. And I don’t want to overstate the gap between them, partly what interests me is that they are so intimately connected, but there’s so many reasons, we run into problems when we’re trying to study across them. And so my contribution to some degree was a personal narrative, as much as anything else about the process of coming to be a historian of the Western Mediterranean or of Spain and North Africa, the kinds of challenges I confronted and, and what I learned from this process of, of training to do two things or to wear two hats.

Conor Howard  

One of the things that sort of struck me is this relationship between transnational history and I guess, interdisciplinarity, within the humanities, or the social sciences even, I was wondering if you had anything else to say about that relationship, and perhaps how transnational history could be a way that we bridge some of these gaps.

Hussein Fancy  

It’s a terrifying thing to do, both from an intellectual, personal and also practical level to try and claim which is foolish that you are expert or expert enough in two domains to be able to write about them with competence. Two things strike me about the turn to the global, the turn to the transnational is that we’re always in risk of being accused by people who identify with one or the other of being incompetent. And I think I’m always being accused of being incompetent, I’ve become I’ve become very callous and used to this idea that that I’m not, I’m not particularly good at either of the things I claim to do. But maybe together, I do them well, or do them in a way that others don’t. One challenge, of course, is we don’t want to fall into the trap of hypothesizing what it is that we’re comparison of treating them as poles, as opposites, this challenge, and I think that is one danger, one pitfall that lies before us is comparativists. So there are challenges and training. And again, this is what my piece is about. And finally, there are challenges on the job market, which is to say, it’s very rare to find positions that are advertised in this way. However, progressive we may be as fields, we don’t advertise positions as historians that fall out of the time and place kind of category; it’s very hard to convince your colleagues that those fields exist. And then, on the occasion that we do, it’s very hard to recruit people to apply for those positions, it’s very hard to advertise those positions, very hard to find competent people are very strong people who feel that they understand the language you’re choosing to describe what it is that you want. So I found from beginning to end, the invitation to step into comparative work, or global work is actually fraught with all sorts of dangers that are fascinating. One of the things that intrigues me as a scholar of comparative work comparative study, is to find those connections to find those relations that were absent, but also to denaturalize, let’s say the frames by which we approach things. So curatorial work, we tend to naturalize or call, for instance, this is very typical when it comes to the Islamic World, we tend to call everything from the Islamic World “Islamic,” regardless of what it is, we tend to see religion everywhere. But that in and of itself is a category of analysis as a category of framing, one of the beauties of doing comparative work, one of the beauties of thinking about objects as they move from place to place or how they become to be repurposed or understood in different contexts, is it keeps you alert and alive to the categories of analysis that you’re using. The deepest problem we face as historians is not that our sources are trenchant, it’s that our own views of the world are the most trenchant things. They’re the most difficult things for us to unearth.

Conor Howard  

I just like to hear how your experiences shaped how you are participating in the training of, I guess, the next generation of comparative and transnational scholars.

Hussein Fancy  

Great question. I was so fortunate to be trained, training in graduate school just at that very moment. And some of the earliest sort of germs of the kind of work I do came from the very late and height of cultural history that sort of turn to new languages and study of the Near East were very important to me. And I would say that the most important thing about my training is that I was incredibly undisciplined. I had never taken a history class before arriving at graduate school, which I think was the first bizarre thing about me was that I was an English major. And my attention to sources was, as one would approach them in an English class that I was very, very attentive to texts and treating primary sources as almost literary sources. I was also very, very curious about how one narrates history, how it talks and writes about history. So there was a kind of naivete to the fact that I thought it was perfectly reasonable to do the foolish thing of trying to master two disciplines. So I thought it was perfectly reasonable for historian to do the kinds of things I chose to do, namely, to try to have a multisided project to try to master two traditions. And it was in that process that I encountered a parting of the ways, as I call it. Again, this speaks to the eccentric way, I think in which I read, which has been really profitable for me. I realized that what scholars do in one department is not what they do in another department. And what we take as norms in our fields are widely divergent. And that parting of the ways I think, is an apt metaphor, partly because I think some of the divisions within history itself, its relationship to positivism, its relationship to Philology, for instance, are still haunted. And the question of the transnational, I think it’s the emergence of the question of the comparative as, as I would say, its emergence again, we might say Mediterranean studies is another example of this, its emergence within medieval studies, as a suddenly very powerful tool speaks to irresolvable tensions in the field about how one goes about naming the project that we undertake, what is the core problem, which is to say, what is the relationship between individual and social consciousness, I might say, is the fundamental irresolvable problem of all our projects, how do we name the thing that it is we study? How do we place it into comparison? How does it come to mean something outside of its context that is durable and identifiable? I was, I think, always alert to this question or problem, because I saw it being approached in two radically different ways into departments, a history department that was very much besotted by the cultural turn moment. And I think I got to be trained in a moment where cultural history was waning, which I thought was a fascinating thing. And at the same time, I was working in a department, this is a Near East studies department, in which what mattered was your grammatical precision. What mattered was your ability to truly understand what the texts were saying, and that we were doing such very different things just 100 feet away from each other, was mind blowing to me.

Paul Chamberlain  

One of the other things that came out with a lot of the contributions was the way that the study of international, transnational, and global history, even though it aims at breaking away from the nation state, it has had the effect of reminding scholars of the importance of the nation state and the centrality of the nation state as a central player in world affairs. Right. So this is something that Cindy Ewing talks about in her contribution. She is someone that has tried to do a lot of work on actors in the Global South. And what she’s found is an example of the enduring importance of the nation state international affairs. Another one of our scholars, Eric Scott talks about the continued salience of borders in international history. And so you have this interesting dynamic where the project of transnational and international history emerged out of this, this excitement over globalization, but then the 21st century has just in terms of current events, and in terms of the scholarship that people are producing has just reminded us just how important nation states are. But another contributor Kaysha Corinealdi talks about her approach to teaching transnational history in her classes as a process of world making that includes states, empires, transnational actors. Julia Stephens talks about the reality that even though transnational historians spend a great deal of their time talking about mobilities and talking about movement, one of the things that she’s found is that a lot of these actors actually remain rooted in place, right. So there is a dynamic where on the one hand, many groups are moving across borders, there are flows of commodities, ideas, capital; but there are also many actors that remain rooted in place. Then finally, Quinn Slobodian considers the structural and institutional pressures on global historians that are brought by the forces of global capitalism, and the way that global history has been shaped by larger kind of capitalist forces as well in the way that that has pervaded the discipline.

Daniel Story  

One thing that I’m interested to ask if you wanted to say anything more about how you see this contribution in the history lab, addressing or advancing, or maybe even picking a little bit of a friendly fight with the 2006 piece in the in the journal.

Paul Chamberlain  

Honestly, I think it probably complements the 2006 piece, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, that’s really a direct challenge to the sorts of things that people were saying back in 2006. But I do, and this is something that comes up in a lot of my classes where, you know, for instance, we’ll be talking about the “new diplomatic history”, right, or the “new American history,” and the realization that these are developments that date back in the 70s 80s, and 90s. And for my students, this is no longer new, right, most of my students were born after 2000. And so to show them a piece that was written in 1993, and say, Look, this is the new fill in the blank history is, is really kind of miss misleading. And so I think that has a certain relevance to the current situation with transactional history. And that this was something that was shiny and exciting and new in the first decade of the 21st century. But now it’s something that’s very established.

Paul Chamberlain  

But I think when you put all the pieces together, and you read them together, one of the things that came out to me was just the degree to which the transnational turn, despite the fact that we’re, you know, we’re two decades in, it remains very much unfinished, right, and that there’s still a great deal of work to be done. I think we still face challenges in defining the field, and really understanding what it means to be doing international and transnational history. This idea that, despite the fact that there is, I would say, almost universal, or a strong majority of scholars in discipline, I think, have embraced the idea of transnational history; there’s still a great deal of work to be done and more traditional forms of national histories have, I think, a very powerful hold on the institutions of higher education, and on the sort of research and work that we’re doing.

Daniel Story  

Yeah. So the journey continues.

Paul Chamberlain  

Yeah.

Daniel Story  

That was Paul Chamberlain, discussing the transnational history forum he convened. We also heard from three of the forums, contributors, Rebecca Herman, Maria John, and Hussein Fancy, on each of their own particular perspectives on this work. You can find the forum in its entirety in the March 2023 issue of the AHR. And if you’re interested in comparing with the previous transnational history conversation, you can find it in the December 2006 issue.

History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association, and the University Library at the University of California Santa Cruz. Episode 12 was produced by Conor Howard and me, Daniel Story, with engineering support from Myles Rider Alexis. You can learn more about this and other episodes at americanhistoricalreview.org. That’s it for now. See you next time.