Lara Putnam

Travels and Terrains: Transnational Approaches to the History of Race and Anti-Racism in the Post-Emancipation Atlantic World

The last decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the international history of racism and antiracism. The digitization of ever-greater swathes of the world's printed past, too, has made new research techniques possible.  As a result, the international dimensions of struggles long studied within national frames have received new attention. We have gained vivid portraits of activists, organizations, and publications that linked far-flung sites.  Yet in the process, topics deemed central by a previous wave of scholarship—like labor dynamics, land tenure, demography, and political structures—seem to have taken the back seat.

Which aspects of the historical development of race and capital do we understand better now that we are routinely remembering to look beyond borders? What are we failing to see?  This essay traces different kinds of connections between Venezuela, Trinidad, and South Africa, and uses them as a springboard to examine the contributions and blind spots of recent work on the transnational histories of race and of capitalism.

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

Occurring simultaneously with the "transnational turn" has been a less-remarked but absolutely crucial shift in the accessibility of raw material at the core of all historical inquiry: sources generated in the past.  Text-searchable digitized newspapers, ancestry dot com, and Google books are suddenly at our fingertips, and with vertiginous speed are expanding their offerings outward from initial U.S.-heavy array to documents generated across the globe.  The ability to conduct instantaneous granular searches within vast arrays of secondary sources is no less revolutionary. These shifts have changed the practice of historical research in fundamental ways, yet are rarely discussed as such when folks talk about "digital history" or the "digital humanities." 

Digitized, text-searchable primary sources make visible and accessible a much wider swathe of historical actors.  But they do not make visible everyone equally. What about those who didn't move, who didn't write, and who were not written up?  We now have extraordinarily powerful tools for answering certain kinds of questions—but not for answering all questions, and not for exploring all processes that might be part of the answers.  If we are disproportionately drawn to those topics and those people whose histories are suddenly, gloriously writeable, we risk generating a generation of scholarship in which each individual account is true, illuminating, and engrossing—and yet the overall picture is fundamentally skewed.