Journal of World History Special Issue: World History and Ethnic Studies – Free!

The World History Association hosts its annual meeting at San Francisco State University from June 27 to 29, on the theme “CURRENTS.” The Journal of World History offers this accompanying special collection, “World History and Ethnic Studies: A Convergence Whose Time Has Come” free on the Project MUSE platform through September 30. Select World History titles will also be 30% off from July 1 through Sept 30, 2024.

The 11 articles collected by associate editor Laura J. Mitchell in “World History and Ethnics Studies” demonstrate the potential for thinking across the fields of world history and ethnic studies, an approach that includes critiques of canonical world history.

Members of an American Congressional committee were investigating the Japanese picture brides at the immigration station of Angel Island. This photograph was taken on July 25, 1920. Courtesy of Getty Images, and featured in “Japanese American Migration and the Making of Model Women for Japanese Expansion in Brazil and Manchuria, 1871-1945” by Sidney X. Lu in this special collection.

In her introduction to the issue, Mitchell writes:

This year’s digital-only special issue brings interdisciplinarity into relief by exploring the relationship between world history and ethnic studies—related fields that benefit from mutual interrogation, as this collection shows. The context of 2024—both globally and in the U.S., where most subscribers to the Journal of World History are based—compells questions about the composition of the nation, historic constructions of identity along racial, linguistic, and gendered lines, the articulation and mobilization of power within societies and across polities, and enduring dynamics of imperial conquest and resistance. As scholars, teachers, and world citizens we are confronted with the continued rise in authoritarian politics; wars in Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan; significant elections in India, South Africa, and the U.S.; and student protest movements challenging the status quo in the U.S., Europe, and the Arab world. So evidence-based understanding about the historical functions of race, ethnicity, cultural movements, and state power are especially relevant.