The Transnational Turn

Abstract

And it interests him less and less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. Historical work, it would seem, consists of both explaining and reinventing. Historians have an obligation to explain past events on the basis of empirical evidence; they are also engaged in considering alternative explanations, often devising new conceptual frameworks. Explaining and reinventing may be pursued simultaneously. And in a period of momentous change, whether in the past on which historians work or in the world in which they live, “inventing” may become necessary when usual explanations no longer seem adequate. In many ways, those of us who have been members of SHAFR from the earliest years may have been “explaining” the history of U.S. foreign relations by “inventing” and “reinventing” conceptual frameworks in response to rapidly changing world conditions. These transformations have been explored by many writers.2 In Saturday, the protagonist deals with one aspect when he muses: “This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish.”3 The forty-year history of SHAFR has witnessed “the expanding circle of moral sympathy,” which now embraces not only the principle of racial equality and tolerance for cultural diversity but also environmental sensitivity. Such a phenomenon, “the modern condition,” did not, of course, arise all of a sudden in the last four decades, but has clearly been felt by historians of U.S. foreign relations, who have been studying not only more traditional subjects such as origins of wars, empire building, and treaty making but also gender, interracial, and intercultural relations as well as human rights, environmentalism, and other themes that have become more and more visible in the recent decades. In this brief essay, it is impossible to cite more than a few examples, but clearly books such as John McNeill's Something New under the Sun, Petra Goedde's GIs and Germans, Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World, or Naoko Shibusawa's America's Geisha Ally reflect the authors’ attempt at tracing “the expanding circle of moral sympathy” in the context of the global transformation.4