Daily Life and Digital Reach: Place-based Research and History’s Transnational Turn

Historians’ expanding access to digitized sources means that international research requires less and less international residence. This has been an unacknowledged driver of history’s “transnational” turn. What risks being lost as a result? This chapter suggests ethical, methodological, and interpretive dimensions. The examples of area studies research and international social history suggest that learning about place and learning in place—and through them, being forced to think critically about one’s own place—can provide vital foundations. I argue that an intentional recommitment to fieldwork is necessary to ensure that our discipline’s transnational turn does not become, in practice, a neo-imperial whirl.