Power,Culture, and the Rise of Transnational History in the United States

This essay focuses on the impact of the cultural turn on the writing of international history in the United States. It argues that the cultural turn has significantly shaped the emergence and practice of transnational history in the United States, drawing foreign relations history closer to other fields within American history and distancing it from the way transnational history is practiced elsewhere, particularly in Europe. It has created a more vibrant and much less well-defined field that engages with issues of race, gender, decolonization, human rights, and the environment. At first glance, the trajectory from the cultural to the transnational turn is not necessarily an obvious one. Both represent distinct approaches with distinct methodologies, historical questions, and subjects. Nonetheless, their fusion in the United States has set the American approach to transnational history apart from its European and non-western counterparts.