Ian Tyrrell

Reflections on the transnational turn in United States history: theory and practice

This article situates the idea of ‘transnational history’ within the recent historiography of the United States, as both a reaction against and accommodation to the nation-state focus of that historiography. It explains transnational historys specific American development as a broad project of research to contextualize US history and decentre the nation; it explores the conditions of American historical practice that influenced the genesis and growth of this version of transnational history; and it compares the concept with competitor terms such as international history, comparative history, global history , histoire croisee, and trans-border. In the United States, transnational history came to be considered complementary to these concepts in its commitment to render American historiography less parochial, yet, because of its origins, the concept has remained limited in application by period and spatial scope. While the concept retains utility because of its specific research programme to denaturalize the nation, transnational history understood as an exploration of ‘transnational spaces’ opens possibilities for an approach of more general historiographical relevance.

COMPARATIVE AND TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY

In 1980, while studying the New South Wales Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) records, I was interested to discover that a fellow worker had already made clear the importance of the women’s temperance movement in New Zealand’s suffrage movement. I was impressed by the veracity of her account in its rendering of both the sources and the mentality of the women concerned. Subsequently, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pat became a figure of some importance within the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, at a time when the so-called Melbourne group associated with Rhys Isaacs and Greg Dening exerted a strong influence over American Studies in Australia. She contributed reviews and articles, and attended our conferences. It was then that I became aware of what a larger-than-life figure Pat actually was. But reading back through her books I could see a strong consistency, a linkage between the words on the page and the person: original, feisty, broad-ranging, energetic and intellectually ambitious. Our paths have crossed fairly regularly since then, though Pat has not in recent years fully developed those earlier contacts and insights in American Studies. In response to central and critical debates in Australian history, her work has gone in different directions. Her first book, Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand, she claimed, was written ‘in isolation from’ the currents of feminism and women’s history ([1972] 1987, vi). Certainly this book is a resolutely empirical work in the best sense, a product originally of a thesis and the intellectual journey that such a project entails for a (very) young scholar. But the published version includes an introductory chapter that shows the direction of her thoughts. The footnotes reference Alan P. Grimes, Aileen Kraditor, William L. O’Neill and others, all of whom evidenced the early stirrings of the American women’s movement as reflected in the history of women in the 1960s. Her second major book, Paths of Duty (1989), more explicitly reflected the debates going on in American feminist history. Both books were also works in comparative history in the way the evidence is treated. One might go further and say that at times they were transnational history, since they studied the movement of peoples, institutions and ideas across and through national boundaries. This was most obviously the case in Paths of Duty if we regard Hawaii, with its political autonomy in the nineteenth century, as a separate entity from its eventual fate as a state of the United States of America. Women’s history was, from the time of Mary Beard at least, suffused with comparative and transnational insights. There was never anything parochial about that field. The attention Pat gave to comparative methods and insights reflects her identity as an antipodean: a New Zealander by birth and education. Her place of origin, perhaps her mental map, lies in an environment marked by distance and isolation from European origins, by exposure to New World comparisons and innovations, and, set in the midst of

New Comparisons, International Worlds: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives

In 1915, American journalist Katharine Anthony wrote in her Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia : ‘The disenfranchisement of a whole sex, a condition which has existed throughout the civilized world until a comparatively recent date, has bred in half the population an unconscious internationalism. The man without a country was a tragic exception; the woman without a country was the accepted rule.’ Anthony believed that women had been shaped in favourable ways by this experience of exclusion from full national citizenship. ‘The enfranchisement of women now under way has come too late to inculcate in them the narrow views of citizenship which were once supposed to accompany the gift of the vote. Its effect will rather be to make the unconscious internationalism of the past the conscious internationalism of the future.’ 1 The conference on ‘New Comparisons/International Worlds’ is both a testimony to the importance of Anthony’s observations, and evidence of women’s internationalism to be interrogated. There is a long tradition of interest in women’s international history; early activists for women’s rights were aware of transnational dimensions of women’s experience, and of the comparability of cross-national gender discrimination. The women who led early movements for women’s rights were also aware of the importance of women both creating and maintaining their own ‘heritage’, through history, and creating new ‘international’ communities through organisations such as the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), International Woman’s Suffrage Association, World’s Young Women’s Christian Association, and the International Council of Women. 2 Amateur writers explored the transnational aspects of the woman movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much international material was included in sources such as the histories of the WCTU; the suffrage journal, Jus Suffragii; the writings of suffragists and peace activists such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams; commemorative histories of women’s suffrage; comparative works by journalists such as Katherine Anthony; and later academic histories that documented these themes. 3 Women were pioneers in what is now called transnational history. Today, there is a major push towards such cosmopolitan approaches in historiography, particularly in the United States. Women’s and other gender-oriented historians need to be aware of this context and its possible pitfalls.

Transatlantic Progressivism in Women’s Temperance and Suffrage

The prominent British journalist William T. Stead’s chief claim to fame today is that he went down to a watery grave on the Titanic on April 15, 1912. At his death, however, Stead had accumulated a long record as a friend of American reform, which is why he was crossing the Atlantic ocean on that fateful occasion. Among the things he admired about Americans was the role of American women in exporting a moral reform culture to Britain and its empire. He briefly described this process in his well-known The Americanisation of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century in 1902 as “by no means one of the least contributions which America has made to the betterment of the world.”1 Stead befriended American woman reformers because he saw them as bearers of what he regarded as progressive change in education, cleaning “vice” out of cities, and promoting better citizenship. They would be leaders of the world and would influence Britain as well.2 American women reformers returned the compliment. They viewed Stead as a great crusader for raising respect for women and combating the vice of prostitution, a campaign that made him a major figure in trans-Atlantic reform circles in the 1890s.3

The Scholarly Odyssey of an Activist Historian: Alan Dawley in Historiography

It would be tempting to see the late Alan Dawley as an intellectual product of the 1960s, a decade that has attracted considerable attention among historians and that shaped the political and intellectual preoccupations of a generation. To be sure, Dawley played a part in that eras social-protest movement that shaped his career as a scholar-activist. Katy Weschler Dawley spoke recently of a young man “with a purpose,” who “became committed to achieve goals of justice, civil-rights and antiwar movements.” These were indeed abiding commitments that would have made the separation of activism and scholarship difficult for any historian, and there is no doubt that Dawley was such a writer driven at the outset by political ideals.

Environment, landscape and history: Gardening in Australia

Harvest of the Suburbs: An Environmental History of Growing Food in Australian Cities. By Andrea Gaynor. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 264.

A Tale of Two Rivers: The Cooks River and the Los Angeles River in Transnational and Comparative Perspective

39.95 paper. Australias Quarter Acre: The Story of the Ordinary Suburban Garden. By Peter Timms. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 231.

Tropical Footprints: Joining Environmental and United States Diplomatic History

39.95 cloth. Clearings: Six Colonial Gardeners and their Landscapes. By Paul Fox. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006 (2005). Pp. xii + 209.

Deadly Enemies: Tobacco and Its Opponents in Australia

59.95 cloth. Remembered Gardens: Eight Women & Their Vision of an Australian Landscape. By Holly Kerr Forsyth. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 273.

The limits of persuasion: advertising, gender and the culture of Australian smoking.

49.95 cloth. A Landscape for Learning: A History of the Grounds of the University of Western Australia. By George Seddon and Gillian Lilleyman. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006. Pp. x + 196.