A comment made by Sophie towards the end our last tutorial regarding transnational history’s restricted engagement with the public got me thinking more about the current divides and how it could be better bridged. In particular, I began wondering why I myself did not know much about transnational history before this semester (aside from my own ignorance), and how this promising new field could expand its reach to other historians and to the public; and indeed, if it should. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the case of the reach of transnational history\nacademically, as usual, the nation has some part to play. The undergraduate\nhistory departments in most universities understandably have a large proportion\nof their teaching and modules centred around traditional nation-state\nframeworks. This is understandable for a discipline whose inception was\npractically tied to the institutions of the nation-state and whose readership\nwas intentionally national. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But just as the wheels of history keep moving along so should\nthe approaches used to study it evolve and adapt somewhat over time. I think\nthere is certainly much rationale for introducing transnational as well as\nglobal and world histories into the historical curriculum at an earlier stage. This\ncould then help to avoid the initial (and sometimes prolonged) disorientation\nyou feel after you step into your first MO3351 tutorial and your nation-centred\nworld starts crumbling all around you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In terms of its wider reach within the public sphere transnational history does risk suffering some of the same problems that the academic writing of history generally does when trying to engage with a readership beyond the lecture hall and seminar room. One of the most notable of these is the overuse of jargon or at least very long, drawn out complex sentences which seek to fit in too many aspects and arguments into one idea or expression, and often go off on tangents, such that they risk losing the intended meaning they started off with – much like this sentence is currently demonstrating. Increasing clarity of expression and only using jargon where it necessarily aids the meaning and understanding of a concept (and is fully explained in laymen\u2019s terms) is a particularly important consideration to bear in mind for historians of a new, evolving field like transnational history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet in terms of subjects studied and context there is a\npotential widespread appeal to transnational history that seems unrealised. Within\nthe diverse and multicultural historical episodes which transnational\nhistorians bring to life, from Tonio Andrade\u2019s \u2018Chinese Farmer, Two African\nboys and a warlord\u2019 and Linda Colley\u2019s Ordeal\nof Elizabeth Marsh <\/em>to broader event-based accounts like Heather\nStreets-Salter\u2019s article, \u2018\u201cThe Local Was Global: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915\u201d,\nthere is an underlying sense that you are reading a completely new angle on a\npreviously well-documented event or being exposed to new accounts of people lives\nwhich were previously unwritten about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, in terms of method, a focus on local histories can\noften facilitate a direct engagement between the transnational historian and\nthe public. This is especially relevant in the case of historians accessing family\nrecords and memorabilia as sources and aiming to sensitively and accurately\nportray personal relationships and stories. We saw a clear example of this in\nthe Transnational Lives <\/em>edited volume\nand Martha Hodes\u2019 account of the sea captain\u2019s wife Eunice Connolly. In\ndiscussing her search for sources, Hodes mentions how lucky she was to meet\ndescendants of Smiley Connolly\u2019s West Indian family in New York and New England\nas well as Eunice\u2019s New England family. This enabled her to follow a more\npersonal take on Eunice\u2019s story and helped form her argument regarding the malleability\nof racial classifications across geographical borders in North and Central\nAmerica in the latter 19th<\/sup> century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no denying the complexity of transnational history,\nand many would argue that\u2019s the fun of it, yet that does not mean it cannot\nengage with a public looking to explore a growing interest in history. Arguably,\nas well, it should; given its current relevance in a globalised era but even more\nso given that it\u2019s simply interesting, status-quo challenging history. The\ndifficulty lies essentially in taking complex transnational phenomena, often\nsubject to various origins and influences, and expressing their significance in\na simple, yet engaging way. Fair to say its easier said than done. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A comment made by Sophie towards the end our last tutorial regarding transnational history’s restricted engagement with the public got me thinking more about the current divides and how it could be better bridged. In particular, I began wondering why<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-n6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1433,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions\/1433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}