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Empires, Visible and Invisible
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DanielImmerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
OrRosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2019
Extract
Over the last decade or so, intellectual historians in and beyond the US field have deepened their engagement with the historical profession's “transnational turn.” This welcome development should hardly be a surprise; after all the turn, which began for Americanists in the late 1990s, owed a good part of its erudition and its energy to some of the most distinguished intellectual historians of that time. Thomas Bender convened four conferences at NYU's La Pietra villa—itself part of some intellectual-history footnotes in the early twentieth century—and also made major scholarly and organizational contributions to the field. Two of the most frequently cited works that made the case for the “internationalization of US history”—avant la lettre—were by similarly preeminent intellectual historians Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg. Other scholars, like David Hollinger, encouraged such work in their students before undertaking a more robustly transnational approach themselves. A wealth of scholarship in recent years has not just continued this tradition but expanded it, with intellectual historians individually and collectively pursuing their subjects across geographic borders as well as methodological boundaries. Two recent edited collections showcase work by scholars (mostly mid-career or younger) and contemplate the possibilities and the limits of different scales and methods of investigating the past in its broadest contexts.
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References
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