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.

Read the special issue here.

World History and Ethnic Studies

A Convergence Whose TIme Has Come


A Convergence Whose Time Has Come
Laura J. Mitchell

Africans and Asians: Historiography and the Long View of Global Interaction
Maghan Keita

Dispatches from Havana: The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan
Ali Raza

Japanese American Migration and the Making of Model Women for Japanese Expansion in Brazil and Manchuria, 1871-1945
Sidney X. Lu

Reviving the Reconquista in Southeast Asia: Moros and the Making of the Philippines, 1565–1662
Ethan P. Hawkley

Between the Red Sea Slave Trade and the Goa Inquisition: The Odyssey of Gabriel, a Sixteenth-Century Ethiopian Jew
Matteo Salvadore

International Conscience, the Cold War, and Apartheid: The NAACP’s Alliance with the Reverend Michael Scott for South West Africa’s Liberation, 1946–1951
Carol Anderson

Singing the Civilizing Mission in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms: The Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nineteenth-Century Germany*
Kira Thurman

African Americans and the Lynching of Foreign Nationals in the United States
William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb

China and the Spirit of Booker T. Washington: Applying Lessons from the Southern Black American Experience in Rural Republican China, 1920–1940
Melvin Barnes Jr.

Aliens in Their Native Lands: The Persistence of Internal Colonial Theory
John R. Chávez

Taking Children, Ruling Colonies: Child Removal and Colonial Subjugation in Australia, Canada, French Indochina, and the United States, 1870–1950s
Christina Firpo and Margaret Jacobs


Learn more about the WHA conference here.