These two contributions constitute this issue's JAH Forum. Forums are intended to spark wide-ranging discussions within the journal and to encourage debate with our colleagues outside of African history on significant trends and cutting-edge developments in dynamic subfields of African history. Each Forum consists of two or more essays on a topic of broad interest within African history and beyond. When inviting contributions, the JAH editors ask authors to discuss the proposed topic from their own unique perspectives while providing some assessment of existing scholarship – both historical and interdisciplinary – and some suggestion of where future studies might or should be heading. For this JAH Forum on Trans-Saharan Histories, we asked Ghislaine Lydon and Baz Lecocq to consider the historical scholarship on the Sahara. We are very pleased to be able to share their insights, which – in different ways – build on a detailed and critical discussion of centuries of scholarship to challenge the idea of a Saharan divide, problematize the cliché of the desert as an ocean, and develop an alternative paradigm of a trans-Saharan region which merits study in its own right.