Paul Kramer

This essay explores the invention of the “global” and its role in the formation of transnational history, through a review of Isaac Kamola’s Making the World Global. As Kamola argues, global thinking reflected a particular, late-20th century moment in the history of U. S. universities and foundations, one characterized by the ascendancy of business and marketing ideologies, declining state support for area studies, and the pursuit of private investment and tuition-paying international students. As this essay argues, global discourse’s emphasis on flow, linkage and exchange informed what can usefully be called a connectionist scholarship that was structured by inquiries into connectivity and a normative valorization of connectedness; this framing profoundly shaped ideas of transnational history as scholarly enterprise. Understanding this genealogy is necessary in order to open space for other definitions of what transnational history is and might become.

This essay responds to the pieces in a special forum in History Australia on historians’ public and political responsibilities in “urgent times.” It does so by discussing historian as “time workers,” and by exploring the concept of history’s “externalities”: What have historical actors identified as outside their spheres of analysis and concern, and what do they place on the inside? Similarly, what do historians place outside and inside the boundaries of their scholarship? The essay argues for the benefits of mapping these inside/outside relationships and, in each instance, for the ethical importance and analytical advantages of bringing the externalities “in.”

This introduction to a special forum on refugees in North American history discusses variations in scholars’ approaches to refugees, with some reconstructing the historical experiences, strategies, itineraries, and perspectives of refugees, and others focusing on the political work of the category and figure of the refugee, as delineating the causes of dislocation and the extent and limits of states’ responsibilities.

This tribute to the late Marilyn B. Young, an historian of US militarization, war and empire, gathers together key themes and insights from her work and provides brief summaries and illustrative quotations from some of her essays over the past two decades.

This interpretive essay makes the case for integrating histories of US immigration politics with imperial histories of the US in the world, specifically by foregrounding and problematizing transnational and global hierarchies and power relations, and thematizing the opening (as well as closing) of the US immigration regime as a function of geopolitical agendas. It explores and reframes the rich, growing landscape of scholarship at the intersection of US immigration and foreign relations, and discusses the instrumentalizing of US immigration policy for purposes of labor access, colonial management, diffusion, legitimation, enmity, and rescue.

This short historiographic essay, part of a roundtable on the history of Pacific empires, describes three broadly-defined approaches to Pacific history: critical empire histories focusing on the Pacific as a space of European, US and Japanese military, colonial and commercial projection and inter-imperial war; indigenist histories centering on the societies and cultures of Islanders; and connectionist histories seeking to integrate the Pacific into broader regional, ethnic and global narratives. It discusses the strengths and limitations of each framework and makes the case for dialogues and interchanges between them.

This essay discusses recent state-level anti-immigration laws through California’s 19th-century struggle with the federal government over immigration.  When, in August 1874, 22 Chinese women were barred from landing at San Francisco by a California official who identified them as “lewd and debauched”—undesirable immigrants under state law—they took the case to the Supreme Court.  Its 1876 decision, Chy Lung v. Freeman, asserted federal primacy over immigration while condemning officials’ superficial profiling of immigrants, establishing a durable precedent.

While the catastrophe following Hurricane Katrina, the "war on terror" and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are usually conceived of separately, this essay demonstrates their profound interconnectedness, from the siphoning off of natural disaster preparation for purposes of anti-terrorism, to the militarization of post-disaster rescue, relief and security operations.

This article, winner of SHAFR’s Bernath Article Prize, reexamines the racial politics of empire at the 1904 St. Louis Fair with an eye towards the tense intersection of metropolitan and colonial agendas.  Where traditional accounts emphasize the coherence of world’s fair racial hierarchies, the Philippine Exhibition at the St. Louis Fair, to the contrary, saw clashes over the appropriate way to display the United States’ consolidating colonial regime and its subjects.

This essay looks at black-Jewish relations in early 20th century Baltimore through the lens of racial practices carried out in the city’s department stores, most of them owned and operated by Jewish families.  Discrimination in these stores—such as a no-returns policy for African-American clothing customers—made them institutions of racial marking, as well as sites of anti-racist protest.

This essay summarizes the methodological approach and themes of The Blood of Government.  Beginning with a critique of conventional, “export” models of transnational cultural history, it provides a definition of “transnational” history and employs this technique to illuminate Philippine-American colonial encounters of the early 20th century through changing racial discourses constructed in both the United States and the Philippines.

This historiographic essay explores and critiques existing approaches to the study of racialized power in the United States’ transnational histories and, especially, the study of US foreign relations.  It advances a new conceptual approach to histories of racialization, and discussing race as a dimension of sovereignty, policy-making, culture, transnational solidarities, cross-national transfer, migration, capitalism and militarization.

This article discusses the possibilities and limitations of region as a subject and frame for the writing of global histories.  It explores competing definitions of the term “region” and, embarking from constructivist premises that cast regions as socio-political projects embedded in modern state territoriality, reviews some of the ways sub-state regions and multistate regions (such as regional federations and alliance systems) have interacted with the global environment.

This essay looks at American civil service reformers’ debates over the administration of U. S. colonies after 1898 and their understandings of colonialism’s impact on metropolitan American politics and vice versa.  Some reformers hoped the colonial state would sponsor innovations in “pure,” expert governance that would—by what they called “reflex action”—spark innovations in the metropole.

This essay discusses racialization and colonial warfare as entangled processes during the Philippine-American War. Changing American visions of the Philippine population, and Filipino efforts to affect those visions, informed the shifting nature of U. S. combat; similarly, the dynamics of combat—especially guerrilla warfare—intensified Americans’ racialization of Filipino combatants and civilians.

This essay discusses the ways the Spanish-Cuban-American War and Philippine-American War were experienced at Princeton University.  The wars prompted politics professor Woodrow Wilson to ponder the implications of colonialism for American institutions, served as a topic for inter-collegiate debate, and saw a former undergraduate from Cuba serve as a Spanish-language interpreter for the U. S. military in the Philippines.

This historiographic essay explores recent innovations in the rescaling of U. S. historical writing and makes the case for the imperial as an analytic category necessary to this effort. Thinking with the imperial, it argues, foregrounds asymmetries of power and connections between societies, while facilitating non-exceptionalist comparisons. The essay’s themes include exceptionalism, methodological nationalism, structure and agency, and the oscillating presence of the imperial in U. S. historiography.

This article opens a special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History dedicated to selected papers given at the 2000 conference “Pairing Empires: Britain and the United States, 1857-1947.”  It introduces the papers and discusses the conference’s goal of framing a conversation about inter-imperial scholarship—the study of connections and comparisons between imperial formations—centered on Anglo-American interaction during the era of “high imperialism.”

This essay argues for the study of international student migration to the United States as an element of U. S. international history, and presents a typology and chronology of student “exchange” since the late 19th century.  It traces the emergence of four modes of student migration (missionary, colonial, self-strengthening, and corporate-internationalist), student migration’s geopoliticization, and a recent, neoliberal turn.

This narrative piece, selected by The Best American Essays 2012 as a “notable essay,” tells the story of Rev. Jesse Routté, an African American Lutheran minister in New York who, in response to racist abuse during a 1943 trip to Mobile, Alabama, returned four years later disguised as a turbaned, Swedish-accented “foreigner.”  When he reported positive treatment, it flaunted contradictions in Jim Crow’s racial definitions.

This essay argues for an imperial lens onto migration history by focusing on “civilized” exemptions to anti-Chinese barriers in the late 19th and early 20th century.  U. S. exporters, missionaries and diplomats opposed totalized Chinese exclusion and lobbied successfully for the exemption of Chinese merchants, students, teachers and tourists, who were seen to be agents of U. S. commercial and cultural power in East Asia.

This essay argues for the necessity of examining U. S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early 20th century as a self-conscious successor to Spanish colonial rule.  While Americans consistently depicted Spanish colonialism as decadent and oppressive, they also selectively borrowed Spain’s institutional models, personnel and built environment in the Islands; this preliminary exploration, published in Spanish, discusses military, political, legal and racial-scientific dimensions of these “trans-imperial” crossings.

This essay argues for the necessity of examining U. S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early 20th century as a self-conscious successor to Spanish colonial rule.  While Americans consistently depicted Spanish colonialism as decadent and oppressive, they also selectively borrowed Spain’s institutional models, personnel and built environment in the Islands; this preliminary exploration, published in Spanish, discusses military, political, legal and racial-scientific dimensions of these “trans-imperial” crossings.

This essay discusses the profound ways that Americans’ debates about U. S. colonialism after 1898 were shaped by their reflections on British colonialism.  Colonialism’s critics contrasted the British Empire’s tyranny with what they saw as U. S. national-exceptionalist freedom; colonialism’s defenders adapted Anglo-Saxonist ideology to make a racial-exceptionalist case for the inevitability of U. S. colonial rule.

This essay introduces a new edition of Leon Wolff’s Little Brown Brother and places the book in the larger context of American historical writing about the Philippine-American War. It argues that the lively narrative history played a critical, if still partial, role in the decolonizing of the war’s history for American audiences.

The essay explores the U. S. military’s regulation of prostitution during the Philippine-American War, and a resulting scandal, as a lens onto the cultural history of U. S. imperial boundaries. Reformers politicized the program, which mandated the venereal inspection of sex workers in order to protect U. S. soldiers, by raising questions about the permeability of the United States not only to disease, but to colonial influences.

This historiographic essay discusses and critiques “new historians of American capitalism,” arguing for the benefits of reframing the enterprise methodologically, as political-economic history, and making the case for the necessity and multiple, reciprocal benefits of connecting histories of capitalism to histories of the United States in the world.  It then presents ongoing research by transnational US historians that deals with political-economic themes, including scholarship on commodities, consumption, law, debt, militarization, migration, labor, race and knowledge regimes.