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Vanderbilt Magazine, October 3, 2022 “When Associate Professor of History Paul Kramer decided to speak out against the use of waterboarding by U.S. forces during the Iraq War, he took an unfamiliar approach. Rather than write an academic article directed only at his colleagues, he tried his hand at a historical narrative …

This essay explores the invention of the “global” and its role in the formation of transnational history, through a review of Isaac Kamola’s Making the World Global. As Kamola argues, global thinking reflected a particular, late-20th century moment in the history of U. S. universities and foundations, one characterized by …

This longform narrative history in the Los Angeles Review of Books, based on extensive interview and newspaper research, explores the surprising, forgotten history of Los Angeles’ first sanctuary city declaration–in November 1985—as a lens onto the historical crossings of urban politics, U. S. foreign relations, and struggles over the place …

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, …

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 …

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 …

How did the US immigration debate get to be so divisive? In this informative talk, historian and writer Paul A. Kramer shows how an “insider vs. outsider” framing has come to dominate the way people in the US talk about immigration — and suggests a set of new questions that …

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 …

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 …

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 …