“’But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950. Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Dec. 1999), pp. 1045-1077.

Summary
In this article, Robin D.G. Kelley contends that scholarship of African American history during the first part of the 20th century offers important insights for current efforts to “internationalize American History. The work of scholars on black history was deeply ensconced with a diasporic vision and shaped by antiracist and anti-imperialist politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such black scholars as George Washington Williams, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin, W.E.B. Dubois, and C.L.R. James, while not sharing the same political vision per se, were all trying to figure out the global implications of the black experience. “Taken together,” Kelley writes, “they offered a different framework for understanding United States history, and the history of the West in general, but – much to the impoverishment of American history – their work had been dismissed or overlooked by the mainstream historical profession.” (1048)  African American history was always global/transnational history.