by guest author Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera: The Transnational as Civil Obedience

The turn toward transnational inquiry appeared revolutionary in the 1990s. But the pluralization of critical models into multi- or cross-national questions has forged only diminutive challenges to extant power structures. Indeed, the transnational is obedient to some of the principal myths of this age: that people believe in or identify with national material. Rather than transcending the slippery folklores of national idolatry and its cultures, the transnational reengages them in ways that do not intend to annul their relevance. In this way, the myth that “American” stories, narratives, and feelings inform people’s lives and cultures in a hybrid or direct way is a (if not the) fundamental presumption in the transnational turn, and it is also a fundamental weakness. Continue reading

Review: The US and Us: American History in Britain in the Twenty-First Century

The framing question of the workshop was: how do we research the US from a distance? Andrew Johnstone, the organiser of this series of events, and holder of the British Academy’s Rising Star Award, drew together an impressive roster of academics, archivists, and librarians to help us answer that question. Continue reading

Review: ‘American Studies after the Digital Turn’

Beyond the classroom, more visualisations and apps may allow a broader audience to engage with the outcomes of American Studies research. A barrier to digital presentation is that it often does not receive the same credit as a monograph or a peer-reviewed journal article. Even when a website or an app is an obvious outlet to publish a mixture of different sources, scholars still feel compelled to publish a book. Continue reading

Review: Quill Project Launch and Digital History Conference, Pembroke College, Oxford

Grace Mallon reviews the Quill Project Launch and Digital History Conference – a platform that will soon become the definitive source available for studying the origins of the text of the Constitution of the United States (and, subsequently, other state constitutions) and transform access to the founding documents of American constitutional law. Continue reading