Historical Consciousness and Transnational American Studies

We are proud to present issue 4.2 of the Journal of Transnational American Studies.It features a set of striking essays, including several original peer-reviewed articles as well as the contents of our Forward and Reprise sections, which offer reprints of texts that have appeared or will shortly appear elsewhere.In addition, we include as our marquee feature a Special Forum on "Revolutions and Heterotopias" (similarly peer-reviewed).The Special Forum is a distinctive section of JTAS, and by all evidence it has become a favorite among our readers (one cheerful aspect of online publishing is that we and our authors receive monthly statistics from eScholarship on the number of views and downloads of each article on our site, so we can keep tabs).Another notable feature of the current issue is the presence, in both the Forward and Reprise sections, of works by the late Günter Lenz, a renowned German specialist in American Studies.As Americanist historians, both of us-Chris Suh and Greg Robinson-are intrigued to note how the current issue of JTAS, throughout its various sections, brings to the fore the role of history in transnational American Studies, and vice versa.In the editor's note for Forward, Greg mentions some of the tools that historians bring to American Studies.Of course, the giving is not simply one way.Indeed, the special value of an interdisciplinary field such as American Studies for historians is how it gives us the opportunity of being exposed to other methods and approaches, and it seems to us that a transnational model of historical development encourages such cross-pollination.For the American story is, among other things, a story of movement in time and space: movement of goods and capital along trading networks; movements of laborers between rural areas and cities, or cities and other cities; and spreading of ideas.Perhaps most importantly, it is the story of migrations of people across oceans and borders, and not just in one direction.If historians choose AMERICA as our field of study, we are looking not at a particular place across a given period, as we may fondly imagine, but at the interactions between people from different places at various moments.The late historian Oscar Handlin opened The Uprooted, his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of immigration to the United States, with a celebrated epigram: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America.Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." 1 If we were to substitute the (admittedly clunkier) phrase "transnational subjects" for "immigrants" in Handlin's words, we might actually get a more complete and accurate sense of what he was driving at.As we learn from various of the selections in this issue of JTAS, American history is not simply the experience of those who come and remain but also of those who come, go back, and then spread sets of ideas of America.Still more, it is the contribution of those Americans who move outside the borders of the United States but find various ways (willingly or otherwise) to take their country along with them.For example, among the articles appearing here, Miranda Wilkerson and Joseph Salmons' contribution, "Linguistic Marginalities: Becoming American without Learning English," provides wonderful testimony into the ways in which a transnational vision, anchored in historical research, can lead us to reexamine conclusions we often take for granted.Wilkerson and Salmons challenge the politically dominant narrative that learning English, historically, has been a prerequisite for immigrants' integration into the American economy and society, as well as a central marker of being American.Through use of census data, church records, and local history books, they present the case of German immigrants in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Wisconsin.These German immigrants' inability to speak English, the two authors demonstrate, did not prevent them from entering professions largely dominated by "Anglo-Americans" or from interacting with non-German-speaking members of their communities.What is more, Wilkerson and Salmons show that the immigrants displayed patriotism toward the United States by taking part in Fourth of July celebrations, even when the country was not at war with Germany and they were not under pressure to conform.There was a time, in short, when it was possible for an immigrant to be "a German

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