Transnational history is here to stay. Over the past three decades, historians have demonstrated that the flow of capital, commodities, ideas and cultural practices across national and imperial boundaries brought the United States to the ‘world’ long before its politicians claimed the position of global superpower. Yet with all this emphasis on global networks, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this movement was undertaken and experienced by human beings.

Focusing on the century and a half between the Early Republic and the outbreak of the Second World War, this course will situate the human body at the center of the transnational turn. Whether they knew it or not, sailors, scientists, soldiers, activists, businesspeople, and performers were at the forefront of American foreign relations in this period. In an age before commercial air travel, the routes and reasons for mobility were especially significant: from individual tourists and entertainers in Europe to the surge of reformers and administrators that poured into the United States’ new territories in Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, people and power went hand in hand.

This seminar examines how power functioned, centering the mutually constitutive relationship between proximal intimacies and distant imaginaries. We’ll investigate how American encounters with foreign places and people shaped responses to key domestic issues and debates. We’ll also think about the role of race, class, and gender inequalities in structuring the American presence in the world. More than just surveying the remarkable breadth of recent literature in this area, students will interrogate a series of critical questions that run through this scholarship: To what extent did Americans act as representatives of their nation abroad? Were missionaries agents of colonialism? Was travel a liberating experience? Who and what did ‘Americanization’ entail? And, perhaps most crucially for historians of the domestic United States, what did Americans bring with them when they returned home?

This seminar introduces students to the field of environmental history through a focus on early America. We will trace the different ways historians have looked at race, empire, and capitalism in relation to the environment over the past few decades. We will look at classics in the field as well as more recent works pushing the field in new directions. Each week is centered on two readings, one a book, and the other an article, with the idea that they complement each other in revealing ways. The seminar moves roughly chronologically (1400-1850) and covers a variety of thematic approaches to environmental history, including work on colonialism, resource extraction, climate, knowledge, and labor. Students will come away with a firm grasp on key trends and debates in both environmental and early American history.

With both global migration and U.S. immigration debates in the news today, immigration is at the center of dramatic changes in contemporary American society and politics. But of course, immigration is nothing new, and the U.S. is just one of many countries around the world with histories of emigration and immigration. We live in a world in motion, and migration and its consequences are central topics of study for scholars in multiple disciplines. Once practiced mainly as the writing of community and ethnic histories or as national social histories, the field has expanded in new directions as it has responded to interdisciplinary theories, critical approaches to race and racism, and global and transnational frameworks.

 This graduate seminar examines U.S. im/migration history as an academic field from its origins in grass roots community history to its evolution into a multidisciplinary field that employs global frameworks. We will explore the role of im/migration in American life and its intersections with settler colonialism, race, citizenship, gender and sexuality, law and politics, labor, international relations, refugee resettlement, human rights, activism, and global/transnational/diasporic frameworks and identities. We’ll examine a range of different methodologies, including archival research, community-engaged research, literature, ethnography, journalism, oral history, critical race. We will consider the origins of the field and read newly-published works that overlap with American Indian, African American, Chicano/Latino, and Asian American Studies and that employ new theories of migration. With debates over immigration in the U.S. at an all-time high, we’ll consider the connections between historical and contemporary migrations, exploring where the field has been and where it is going.

What was the nature of the relationship between the United States and other Western Hemisphere nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What is the relationship between formal and informal empire in US history? Why does Latin America and the Caribbean matter to the construction of US nationalisms? And, in addition to military and economic influence, how was US empire constructed culturally? This course explores the mutual entanglements between the US and Latin American and Caribbean history. It considers various iterations of US imperialism and intervention across the hemisphere, as well as local responses, revolutions, and alternative visions to US empire. Recent historiography has turned away from approaching inter-American relations solely through state-to-state relationships and US archives. Instead, the course draws largely on work based on Latin American and Caribbean perspectives and archives, emphasizing empire’s intersections with race, gender, sexuality, culture, and capitalism. Topics include Manifest Destiny; the War of 1898; racial capitalism; US military interventions; the Panama Canal; the Guatemalan, Cuban, and Chilean Revolutions during the Cold War; US-backed counterrevolution; and migration.