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From James Theodore Holly: Black Nationalist and Religious Writings, edited by Greg Robinson. © 2020, Montreal by Le Centre International de Documentation et d'Information Haïtienne, Caribéenne et Afro-canadienne. Used with permission of the publisher. Publisher website: https://www.amazon.com/James-Theodore-Holly-Nationalist-Religious/dp/1643825348

As a US-born and -educated Americanist teaching in a French-language institution outside the United States, I have learned that United States historians have much to learn from foreign colleagues, both because they explore less-studied aspects of America and because their distance from their subject of study affords them a broader field of vision.

Framing commentary.

This article discusses First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s international travels during the Second World War. Mrs. Roosevelt achieved her greatest renown in the postwar period as a champion of international human rights, notably in her role as chair of the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947–48, and later as leader in the struggle to ratify the Human Rights covenants that enforced the provisions of the Declaration. Yet ER’s later concentration on international affairs was prefigured in her experience as semiofficial diplomat in a series of wartime travels across the globe, undertaken at the request of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in coordination with the chiefs of the host governments. It is useful to investigate how these travels provided her with an important apprenticeship in diplomacy. At the same time, her speeches and activities on these wartime trips helped shape her later support for peace and justice on an international scale.

Introduction by issue editors.This issue represents our journal’s first appearance after the onset of what multiple Americanists have referred to, and not in overly positive fashion, as the “Age of Trump.” A central theme of Trump administration discourse is its strident defense of physical borders  manifested in harshly exclusionary policies, most notably the administration’s abandoning of the existing DACA program, as well as fostering increased visibility of white nationalist groups and openly racist discourse. At the same time, the White House, led by the president, has distinguished itself by its nationalist attacks on international trade and multilateral diplomacy. As scholars of American Studies based outside the United States, we both feel a special responsibility to make use of our position to investigate and discuss the larger forces at play here. One thing that larger transnational approaches can help reveal is the complex interface between national identity, domestic politics, and state policy, especially in regard to international relations.

JTAS presents excerpts from forthcoming and recent monographs and journal articles in the field of Transnational American Studies.

Forward Editor's Note for JTAS 7.1

Forward Editor's Note for JTAS 6.1

Greg Robinson’s article “Whispers of the Unspeakable: New York and Montreal Newspaper Coverage of the Oscar Wilde Trials in 1895,” originally published in 2010 in the French-language journal Rue des Beaux Arts, no. 24 (2010), is here republished and—with much gratitude—translated (for the original text, please see http://www.oscholars.com/RBA/twenty-four/24.7/Articles.htm). Robinson’s transnational study focuses on how reading the specific language of newspaper reports of the Oscar Wilde case, literally from a distance, from places less emotionally attached to and nationally distinct from the scandal’s epicenter in London, England, provides insight into “the state of everyday public knowledge and discussion of (homo)sexuality, at least west of the Atlantic”; thus Robinson’s fascinating research, which involves numerous newspapers—from the elite New York Times to the New York Herald, from the Montreal Daily Star to the French-language papers of Quebec—concludes that the popular press, read transnationally, offers key insights into the developing attitudes toward and levels of interest in the newly forming identity of the “homosexual” across societies.

Forward Editor’s Note for JTAS 5.1

Forward Editor’s Note for JTAS 5.1

Forward Editor’s Note for JTAS 4.1

In his book By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (2001), Greg Robinson discussed FDR’s decision to remove Japanese Americans from their homes and concentrate them in internment camps. Now in this chapter from his recently published book, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics, he unearths Roosevelt’s grandiose and frightening idea of their return to civil society by scattering them—two or three families at a time—in small towns, all away from the west coast. He also thought such a scatter plan would suit refugee European Jews who he hoped would settle in Latin America. Indeed he thought ethnic minorities crowded into American cities might also benefit if resettled in small towns. While this is a racial story, FDR’s vision here was also driven by the rural sentiments of FDR, the gentleman farmer. That produced some highly regarded programs, most notably the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the “Greenbelt towns.” But the massive population transfers that Robinson shows to have been on the president’s mind would have made a mockery of the US rights tradition. Of equal importance, Robinson’s examination of the role of major social scientists recruited to the project provides an object lesson in the dangers of intellect seduced by power.

Editors' Note for JTAS 4.2

Forward Editor’s Note for JTAS 4.2

Forward Editor’s Note for JTAS 3.2

The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.