Karin Wulf's article "Vast Early America" (2019) introduces a historical framework that situates early American history within a larger transnational context, including diverse voices previously marginalized. This concept spans Britain, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Wulf supports this approach, noting its impact on workforce equity and interdisciplinary education. Historians Gould and Zagarri highlight its intellectual benefits, aided by technology. Michael Hatten emphasizes the complementary nature of transnational and national histories in offering a fuller understanding of America's past.

Introduction

Karin Wulf, in her article “Vast Early America” (2019) describes an emerging historical analytical framework that seeks to situate the early American experience in a much larger international historicity.  This framework includes the voices and contributions of Black people, Indian citizens, women, LGBTQIA+, and others that have gone unheard or have been silenced.  The geography of this ‘Vast Early America’ is transnational, Wulf explains, and includes Britain, the west coasts of Africa and Europe, the east coasts of North and South America, and the Caribbean.

Argument

Wulf champions this new history, and today ‘Vast Early America’ is creating new opportunities for citizens and historians alike, including in workforce equity initiatives that are having an impact in and around marginalized communities, and interdisciplinary and cross-cultural historical pedagogy that informs the latest generation of scholars. The emergence of this transnational view of early American history has not occurred without controversary.  Indeed, today the American political conversations over what constitutes national history and who should be allowed to control the narrative about national history dominate the public sphere.

On the merits of transnational history, historians Eliga Gould and Rosemarie Zagarri comment in William and Mary (2021) that “locating the United States within Vast Early America is not only possible but intellectually productive, enriching both U.S. national histories and the ‘vaster’ field in exciting new ways.” Technology brings artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented/virtual reality to bear on the social sciences, including history, newly reshaping the landscape for historical analyses to support a framework for a transnational history that allows for traditional narratives to be included in this ‘Vast Early American’ history. 

Conclusion

“Vast Early America and national history should be seen less as irreconcilable opposites and more as equal and necessary historiographical partners in crafting a narrative—good and bad—that speaks to issues of contemporary relevance while also capturing the full complexity of the ebbs and flows of the nation’s history and peoples,” writes Michael Hatten in “Revolution Lost?” (2021), reflecting on a modern era of historicity that includes ‘the other’ and is broadly informed by larger transnational social-historical and cultural systems, offering a more fulsome history of us.

References

Gould, Eliga, and Rosemarie Zagarri. “Situating the United States in Vast Early America: Introduction.” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 78, no. 2, 2021.

Michael D. Hattem, “Revolution Lost? Vast Early America, National History, and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly. Vol. 78, no. 2. 2021.

Wulf, Karin. “Vast Early America.” Humanities. Vol. 40, no. 1 2019.