paul.kramer

This narrative piece, selected by The Best American Essays 2012 as a “notable essay,” tells the story of Rev. Jesse Routté, an African American Lutheran minister in New York who, in response to racist abuse during a 1943 trip to Mobile, Alabama, returned four years later disguised as a turbaned, Swedish-accented “foreigner.” When he reported positive treatment, it flaunted contradictions in Jim Crow’s racial definitions.

This essay argues for the study of international student migration to the United States as an element of U. S. international history, and presents a typology and chronology of student “exchange” since the late 19th century. It traces the emergence of four modes of student migration (missionary, colonial, self-strengthening, and corporate-internationalist), student migration’s geopoliticization, and a recent, neoliberal turn.

In Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds, Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) This essay briefly summarizes the methodological approach and themes of The Blood of Government.  It provides a definition of “transnational” history and employs this technique to illuminate…

Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Summer 2008)

This narrative essay tells the story of U. S. soldiers’ use of water torture during the Philippine-American War, its exposure by American anti-colonialist critics, and the ensuing 1902 Senate investigation and public debate over the legitimacy of the “water cure” and U. S. colonial warfare more generally.

This essay discusses racialization and colonial warfare as entangled processes during the Philippine-American War. Changing American visions of the Philippine population, and Filipino efforts to affect those visions, informed the shifting nature of U. S. combat; similarly, the dynamics of combat—especially guerrilla warfare—intensified Americans’ racialization of Filipino combatants and civilians.

Introduction to Leon Wolff’s Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Tur

Social History (February 2005) During the 1990s social scientists, journalists and policy-makers collaborated in the assembly ofthe powerful organizing concept of ‘globalization’. While theorizing on a global scale washardly new, ‘globalization’ was represented as both a revolutionary process and the name for anovel historical moment, one in which dense, fluid…

In Avi Y. Decter and Melissa Martens, eds., Enterprising Emporiums: The Jewish Department Stores of Downtown Baltimore (The Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2003) This essay looks at black-Jewish relations in early 20th century Baltimore through the lens of racial practices carried out in the city’s department stores, most of them…