The Opportunity Costs of Remaining a Book Discipline

Essay suggests that technological shifts impacting scholarly communication should encourage us to question the opportunity costs of insisting on maintaining the 100,000 word monograph as the core unit of published scholarship acknowledged for purposes of tenure and promotion within the historical profession. Consideration of visibility and access, the benefits of peer review, and flexibility to reward outreach may all advocate in favor of a move towards "book and/or article discipline" status

Sentiment and the Restrictionist State: Evidence from the British Caribbean Experience, ca. 1925

The international mobility control regime consolidated in the decade after World War I made intimate sentiment a systematic concern for states policing borders and rights. New U.S. immigration laws in the 1920s made family reunification one of the few routes through which migrants could enter the United States when their home society’s quota was exhausted. This essay uses immigration correspondence involving British Caribbean petitioners, from before and after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, to evaluate the consequences of this shift. In the law's wake, ideas about proper female behavior, maternal feeling, and sexual virtue had a major impact on how cases were adjudicated: the ideas of state agents first and foremost, but the ideas of community and family members as well. The power to force territorial exclusion--but not the ability to countermand it--came to rest in the heart of the family.\u

Provincializing Harlem: The “Negro Metropolis” as Northern Frontier of a Connected Caribbean

Recent scholarship has highlighted the contributions of Caribbean immigrants to interwar Harlem's ferment. But the writings of New York-based radicals offer only a partial window onto the transnational context of the Harlem Renaissance, and one that is distorted in systematic ways. This article analyzes the origins and prior experiences of the Caribbean migrants who came to comprise roughly a quarter of Renaissance-era Harlem's populace, and locates them within a wider regional context. Working-class circum-Caribbean migrants in the interwar era were bearers of a quotidian cosmopolitanism, forged to navigate a region-wide labor market. A politics of race-conscious solidarity was being forged in multiple sites around the region, including peripheral receiving-society locations like Panama and Costa Rica. Harlem was but one piece of a broader process

The Panama Cannonball’s Transnational Ties: Migrants, Sport, and Belonging in the Interwar Greater Caribbean

The interwar years saw the creation of a circum-Caribbean migratory sphere, linking British colonial sending societies like Jamaica and Barbados to receiving societies from Panama to Cuba to the Dominican Republic to the United States. The overlapping circulation of migrants and media created transnational social fields within which sport practice and sport fandom helped build face-to-face and imagined communities alike. For the several hundred thousand British Caribbean emigrants and their children who by the late 1920s resided abroad, cricket and boxing were especially central. The study of sport among interwar British Caribbean migrants reveals overlapping transnational ties that created microcultures of sporting excellence. In this mobile and interconnected world, sport became a critical realm for the expression of nested loyalties to parish, to class, to island, to empire, and to the collective they called “Our People,” that is, “the Negro Race,” worldwide

Borderlands and Border Crossers: Migrants and Boundaries in the Greater Caribbean, 1840–1940

This essay assesses recent scholarship on Caribbean borderlands and Caribbean migrations in the century after emancipation. Despite the wealth of scholarly contributions, collective knowledge has been radically limited. Centralized migratory flows that carried (usually male) workers to labor for large-scale foreign-owned employers tended to generate social boundaries and ideologies of racial difference. Such cases have set the paradigm for scholars' understanding of Caribbean migration. Meanwhile, diffuse migrations toward dispersed opportunity—an equally or more common pattern, as population figures show—generated blurry sociocultural boundaries at the time and little scholarly attention since. As a result, significant swathes of experience are invisible in the cumulative historiography of Caribbean borderlands and border crossers. The essay points to pre-World War II migration to New York, women's migration everywhere, and interactions between the anglophone and hispanophone Caribbeans in immigrant destinations as key areas for further research

Contact Zones: Heterogeneity and Boundaries in Caribbean Central America at the Start of the Twentieth Century

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as direct foreign investment in bananas and other exports boomed, migrants from the British West Indies, French Caribbean, South America, Western Europe, China, Syria, and India reached Caribbean Central America, as did Spanish-speaking mestizos who crossed provincial or regional rather than international borders to do so. This essay examines the conceptualization of racial and cultural difference by North Atlantic travelers to the banana zones, on the one hand, and Caribbean denizens of the same, on the other. European and U.S. observers insisted that racial distinctions were real and self-evident. In contrast, Afro-Caribbean migrants, though they used the same racial labels to describe the social world around them, insisted that power difference rather than cultural or biological difference determined the fate of racial collectives

Sidney Young, the Panama Tribune, and the Geography of Black Belonging

As British Caribbean migrants moved outward from their home islands at the start of the twentieth century, they created a vibrant transnational culture. Central to it was a flourishing circum-Caribbean press, comprised of papers owned, edited, and read by men and women of color in Grenada, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Costa Rica—and Panama. Quotations and subscriptions linked readers at all these sites to the U.S. "Negro Press" of Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. The peripheral black press offered colonials of color a panoramic view of the evolving geopolitics of white supremacy: and a place to debate what could be done in response. One tireless campaigner in the circum-Caribbean press was Sidney Adolphus Young (b. Jamaica, 1898, d. Panama, 1959). Young nurtured an unprecedented flowering of black journalism in Panama as the editor of the Panama Times's "West Indian Page" from 1926 to 1927 and subsequently as founder and editor of the Panama Tribune, which he founded in 1928. For the next three decades, the Tribune under Young’s editorship would function both as a staging ground for local activism and as a window onto the wider "Coloured World.

What Dollar Stores Tell Us About Electoral Politics

This essay uses SNAP-authorized dollar stores per district as an indicator of the intersection of rurality and hardship. The authors show that dollar store counts create congressional district clusters that are more socio-economically homogenous than classification based on geographic density does. Up until 2016, the authors find, districts with more dollar stores had been swinging towards the Republican Party, a trend that culminated with the election of Donald Trump. But in the 2018 midterms, mid-to high dollar store districts swung as sharply towards the Democrats as did low dollar store districts

The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast

This working paper explores the consequences for historians' research practice of the twinned transnational and digital turns. The accelerating digitization of historians' sources (scholarly, periodical, and archival) and the radical shift in the granularity of access to information within them has radically changes historians' research practice. Yet this has incited remarkably little reflection regarding the consequences for individual projects or collective knowledge generation. What are the implications for international research in particular? This essay heralds the new kinds of historical knowledge-generation made possible by web access to digitized, text-searchable sources. It also attempts an accounting of all that we formerly, unwittingly, gained from the frictions inherent to international research in an analog world. What are the intellectual and political consequences of that which has been lost

Middle America Reboots Democracy

Describes shifts in political participation in 2017-2018, as the rate of engagement in face-to-face political action among college educated women has surged, in concert with a wave of formation of new, local political action groups in Middle America's suburbs