Academic Articles

This historiographic essay explores and critiques existing approaches to the study of racialized power in the United States’ transnational histories and, especially, the study of US foreign relations. It advances a new conceptual approach to histories of racialization, and discussing race as a dimension of sovereignty, policy-making, culture, transnational solidarities, cross-national transfer, migration, capitalism and militarization.

This historiographic essay discusses, promotes and critiques “new histories of American capitalism,” arguing for the benefits of reframing this enterprise methodologically, as political-economic history, and making the case for the necessity and multiple, reciprocal benefits of connecting histories of capitalism to histories of the United States in the world. It then presents ongoing research by historians of the US in the world that deals with political-economic themes, including scholarship on commodities, consumption, law, debt, militarization, migration, labor, race and knowledge regimes.

This interpretive essay makes the case for integrating histories of US immigration politics with imperial histories of the US in the world, specifically by foregrounding and problematizing transnational and global hierarchies and power relations, and thematizing the opening (as well as closing) of the US immigration regime as a function of geopolitical agendas. It explores and reframes the rich, growing landscape of scholarship at the intersection of US immigration and foreign relations, and discusses the instrumentalizing of US immigration policy for purposes of labor access, colonial management, diffusion, legitimation, enmity, and rescue.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2017 What role might historians committed to democratic and egalitarian politics play in challenging authoritarianism?  This essay takes on conventional claims that history is absent from public debate, and that it has “lessons” to teach, arguing instead that historical thinking is ever-present and…

This historiographic essay explores recent innovations in the rescaling of U. S. historical writing and makes the case for the imperial as an analytic category necessary to this effort. Thinking with the imperial, it argues, foregrounds asymmetries of power and connections between societies, while facilitating non-exceptionalist comparisons. The essay’s themes include exceptionalism, methodological nationalism, structure and agency, and the oscillating presence of the imperial in U. S. historiography.

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines.

This essay responds to the pieces in a special forum in History Australia on historians’ public and political responsibilities in “urgent times.” It does so by discussing historian as “time workers,” and by exploring the concept of history’s “externalities”: What have historical actors identified as outside their spheres of analysis…

This introduction to a special forum on refugees in North American history discusses variations in scholars’ approaches to refugees, with some reconstructing the historical experiences, strategies, itineraries, and perspectives of refugees, and others focusing on the political work of the category and figure of the refugee, as delineating the causes of dislocation and the extent and limits of states’ responsibilities.

This essay discusses ongoing challenges in the historiography of U. S. colonialism, through a critique of Daniel Immerwahr’s 2016 article in Diplomatic History, “The Greater United States.” It discusses the ways Immerwahr’s article draws upon a number of widespread problems in this field: a terminological conflation of U. S. colonialism…

This piece puts the US Supreme Court’s upholding of the travel ban in an historical context. Supporters argued that the ban was about national security rather than racism; opponents that it was about racism rather than national security. But both sides separated logics that haven’t been separable: ideas of national…