Previews

Current disputes among American historians over the fragmentation of the discipline pit local or regional against national histories or, as in this issue, transnational against national histories. The debates have often been sterile, Richard White argues, because historians do not recognize space and scale as central issues. They talk past each other, some citing problems best studied locally and others citing problems calling for a national or global field of vision. White recommends inquiry about the scales appropriate to different historical investigations, the trade-offs in any choice of scale, and the production of space itself: in history through social practice and in the practice of historians as they frame their projects.

Should historians fear the medium of film? Bruno Ramirez demonstrates how his experiences as filmmaker and academic historian sensitized him to hidden pathways in the lives of his subjects. Writing screenplays, Ramirez contends, freed him from the rigid, rationalistic methods that stifle fluid, immediate, "narrative understandings" of the past. He explains how his writing on migration history attained transnational and transcultural dimensions, as he focused on the lives of individuals who crossed boundaries and reshaped cultures. Ramirez urges academic historians to employ storytelling, filmmaking, and other narrative techniques that, he hopes, can increase their impact on society's historical culture.

As an Australian scholar, Ian Tyrrell has gravitated toward transnational perspectives on American history. Here he throws new light on the transnational origins of American academic historiography. Rather than typecast Frederick Jackson Turner as an exponent of an American uniqueness forged on the frontier, he shows Turner and other American academic historians of the early twentieth century advocating comparative and transnational approaches even as they championed histories focused on the nation. To explain the apparent contradiction, Tyrrell describes how transnational perspectives, which at first prospered, were marginalized as the relationship between professional historians and the American nation-state changed during the twentieth century.

Robin D. G. Kelley suggests that earlier generations of African American historians had begun to internationalize American history a century ago. He argues that their understanding of the global dimensions of the "Negro"—and hence the whole American—experience were fundamentally shaped by their search for alternative political models outside the United States. The essay focuses on scholars working on the history of the United States. But, Kelley believes, historians should look for—and would find—similar approaches in the study of black people in other disciplines (such as anthropology and sociology) and among scholars in other countries of the diaspora.

Labor history has often ignored the transnational traditions of the labor movement. Much labor historiography displays methodological nationalism, with strict separation between studies of different nations, Marcel van der Linden argues. His article helps us recapture a sense of workers' transnational struggles and of class loyalty as an alternative to national identity. He surveys the recent outpouring of work on transnational labor history and documents both parallels in the experience of the working classes in different countries and cross-border interactions among workers. Reflecting on theoretical and methodological issues, he suggests directions a transnational American labor history might take.

To historians of early modern North America, the nation-state has rarely seemed the right unit of study. . . .