The Transnational Turn: Re-Interpreting Twentieth-Century U.S. History

The transnational turned in the early 2000s has opened up new ways of understanding the United States, its conflicts, and … in the 20th century.

Kelley's 1999 article, however, shows how scholarship from black scholars in the first part of the twentieth century precipated much of the transnational turn since the 1990s. He highlights such works by George Washington Williams and W.E.B. Dubois, which empahsized the the international context of the black experience. Black historical scholarship was not confined to national borders; their goal was to write a history of the race, which often took them acroos and beyond national borders. Kelley's work thus provides important historical context to recent trends in scholarship. He ultimately argues, based on his overview of black historical scholarship, that internationalizing United States history does not mean a great emphasis on foreign policy and foreign relations, but an examination of how tenuous national borders and identities are.