Contributing to an important debate, sparked by two leading historians in this roundtable, on the renewed need for U.S.-centered approaches in the field of U.S. and international history, this essay argues such approaches will contribute to the field only insofar as scholars exercise a methodological self-consciousness aimed at “recentering the U.S. ‘without exceptionalism.’” Embracing traditional and innovative social, cultural, political, and economic methods in both domestic and international spaces, such a field (one avoiding the perils of prior scholarship) promises a much-needed reexamination of the inner-driven dynamics of the “American Century”—a comparatively brief, yet sweepingly consequential, period of U.S. global supremacy after World War II, whose powerful, often tortuous, legacies are still with us.
Addressing imperial Japan’s Pearl Harbor-like bombing of the USS Panay and other U.S. commercial vessels in December 1937, this article investigates this little-known episode, also known as the “Panay Incident”—the most serious crisis in U.S.-Japanese relations before World War II—as a profound collision of U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-Chinese capitalisms in a broader Asia-Pacific economy. Challenging prevailing wisdom, it argues that Japan, not China, inspired businesses, workers, and consumers as the modern, globalizing linchpin of a transpacific economy—yet in ways which posed a growing dilemma threatening the entire U.S. and East Asian economic order.
Published in Diplomatic History, the official journal of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, this article examines the foreign policy ideas and politics of journalist Helen Mears, a U.S. Cold War critic who fell from World War II-era national prominence as a result of her Cold War-era dissent against a rising U.S. national security state after World War II. Paralleling and inspiring the New Left’s Third World turn, Mears’s dissent, drawing on her personal experiences in post-World War I Asia and shrewdly ethnographic awareness of state power, reveals the centrality of the U.S. state and U.S.-Asia relations in the evolution of the New and Third World Left. Challenging existing scholarship which largely depicts the postwar U.S. left as a provincial, domestically-oriented movement, this piece presents a timely, crucial study of Mears’s Third World-focused postwar politics and thought, emphasizing the genuine, strongly rooted internationalism which helped impel Sixties-era U.S. and global radicalism to this day.
This piece in Pacific Historical Review examines U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s Cold War dissent as a window into racial geopolitics in a post-World War II era of decolonization and U.S. global power. Focused on Wallace and the United States, it uses a wide range of published and archival sources to argue that Wallace and U.S. anticolonial liberal elites saw anti-racist egalitarian pressures in the post-1945 international system as not only a threat, as existing scholarship suggests, but also an opportunity for U.S. global expansion—particularly in the Pacific Rim. By the 1960s, Wallace and postwar anti-racist activists diminished in influence amid global Cold War pressures reviving racial restrictions and Cold War militarization after the Korean War. Nonetheless, Wallace’s anti-racist diplomacy, stemming from long-running U.S. and global liberal debates and political struggles over race and empire, suggests the wider role of anti-racist geopolitics and the paradoxical persistence of race as a global cultural concept in the postwar era.
Drawing from my larger work on postcolonial Korea and U.S.-Asia relations, this book chapter argues for a recasting of historical and contemporary Korean America as a global and transnational phenomenon at the discursive and material crossroads of Korea-centered globalization from the late nineteenth century decline of Chosŏn Korea and Korea’s colonization by Japan through the Cold War and 1990s-era neoliberal globalization. Korean America, this piece argues, comprised an “inter-imperial” diaspora emerging from the traumatic interstices of U.S.-Korea relations, particularly after World War II.