Week 2 Blog

This week’s readings provided extensive depth into not only how to come to terms with and define (to an extent) transnational history and similar historical approaches, but also how they came about and under what contexts and reception.

The AHR Conversation was a particularly insightful text as one was able to generate their own conclusions based on a plethora of opinions from scholars all interested and engaged in transnational history. Primarily, I deduced the importance of transnational history for studying people and following people throughout late modern history. The dismissal of traditional data in favour of foregrounding lived experience and entangling human experiences struck out as an important aspect of what this historical approach can bring to the table on historical phenomena that may appear entirely thought out or studied comprehensively on the surface. At this point, I began comparing this idea to previous essays and bodies of text I have written as a part of my degree.

My Honours Project last semester explored how anti-Communist rhetoric and societal perceptions of Communism delayed the Black Freedom Movement in the United States between 1920 and 1960. As I researched, I found that up until the 1980s (and in the 1970s but to a far lesser extent) American historians tended to focus on anti-Communism and the negative impact of Communism both nationally and internationally when looking at the period of American social history between 1920 and 1960. To a large extent, only ‘Communist’ or left-wing historians, who also were typically not American and were at best on the margins of mainstream history, were more objective in their approach to Communism and its impact, specifically the impact of anti-Communist rhetoric on social behaviour and political leanings. This favouring of anti-Communist bias in American historical texts indicates what Pierre Yves Saunier’s text points out; the prevalence of ‘exceptionalism’ in American historical approaches.

As I finished Chapter One of Saunier’s book, it occurred to me that this has the potential to once again change how transnational history is defined, or what constitutes falling under that category. If, as Saunier and scholars at the AHR Conversation consistently point out, transnational history was born from a need for decentering national and territorial boundaries from historical inquiry and instead focusing on groups of people and their connected experiences and movements (I am still struggling to define the term articulately), then how can this sort of ‘transnational’ approach in American history that is under a framework of American ‘exceptionalism’, which is ultimately a national idea, be considered transnational?