Transatlanticism has long been a key concept in early American literary study, bringing matters of mobility, race, and cultural contact into the foreground of the field. The current crop of studies in the field discussed in this essay serve to expand and deepen our sense of what transatlanticism can mean as a key term in the work of American studies, a sense that has been growing as a result of the excellent work in the field in recent years. Given the vitality of the field of Atlantic studies over many years, one might be tempted to wonder whether the concept might be nearing a saturation point; the studies discussed in this essay demonstrate that the exploration of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic milieu is still tremendously productive of new insights. The idea of transatlanticism in early and nineteenth-century American literary studies, can, at its most narrow, suggest a model in which scholars examine the movement of people, material goods, ideas, and texts from the metropolitan center of London to the colonial periphery. Even studies that deal with more complex phenomena such as the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons can fall into a pattern of representing the trade from above. What Flavell, Bannet, and Marshall all accomplish is both to call attention to the multidirectional circulations of ideas and goods and to provide a highly nuanced and textured account of the complexities of class, race, and region in shaping these circulations. The other danger for Atlantic studies is the temptation to present the cultural exchanges around the Atlantic world, and especially in North America, as a largely anglophone affair. Engel and Erben both stress the importance of German-language cultural and material circulations, and they further demonstrate that these circulations are not merely parallel to anglophone networks, but rather are intimately entwined with them.

The studies described below add substantially to the ongoing growth and expansion of the field of Atlantic studies by emphasizing the many routes that persons, texts, religions, and even languages could travel as part of a thoroughly networked and surprisingly decentered Atlantic world. Flavell, Bannet, and Marshall all call attention to the circulations that emerged in the anglophone Atlantic, while Engel and Erben remind us that transatlanticism was a multilingual affair, and that European peoples beyond the linguistic boundaries of the major imperial powers had a substantial stake in these circulations. Throughout these five studies, we see repeated evidence of the crucial role of intellectual, literary, economic, and political networks in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic and the multidirectional commerce – material and intellectual – that the networks enabled.

The most networked city in the eighteenth-century world is at the core of Julie Flavell's study When London Was the Capital of America. Flavell's work contributes to the burgeoning field of transatlantic studies, but London's unique position in the eighteenth century as an entry point for Asian goods into Europe and the Americas means that her study expands beyond the category of the merely transatlantic. Flavell emphasizes the ways in which Americans experienced their position in relation to the imperial center as marginal and grounds her study in material and social rather than cultural history. In Flavell's telling, London served as something more than just a cultural touchstone for eighteenth-century colonists; rather it is the literal center of the English-speaking world, both absorbing influences from around the globe and disseminating them to every portion of the planet. In relation to America, London functions as a capital that is all the more imposing because of its great distance from the colonies and because of its status as a locus of desire and authority for aspiring Americans.

Flavell reminds her readers that London was “perhaps the greatest city America ever had, for it combined these centres of government, commerce, and culture into a single mighty metropolis, the like of which would never be seen in the United States” (3). London's status as the paradigmatic American city for longer than any other is a paradox, but also a crucial feature of the early American cultural landscape. The example of Benjamin Rush, which Flavell invokes at the start of her study, is instructive. Rush is, of course, a seminal figure in the story of American nationalism, but he is also a figure who regards London as a kind of cultural homeland. In this, he was joined by many contemporaries from varying geographical regions and racial and cultural backgrounds. Rush's remark in a letter to his son, that “that great city is an epitome of the whole world … Nine months spent in it will teach you more by your ‘eyes and ears’ than a lifetime spent in your native country” (quoted in Flavell, 1), illustrates the degree to which American nationalism could coexist with an avid enthusiasm for its erstwhile metropolitan capital. As Flavell so elegantly illustrates, Benjamin Rush was not eccentric, but representative in this view of London, and Americans from across the colonies and the new republic found much to appeal to them in London. Indeed, Rush's southern compatriots were among the most enthusiastic of visitors to London, and Flavell builds a large portion of her narrative around the experiences and misadventures of one South Carolina family, that of Henry Laurens, and their time in London. Flavell is also concerned to point out the degree to which London, as a cosmopolitan center, is a creation of America as well as a destination for Americans: she notes that much of the racial diversity and cultural richness of eighteenth-century London derived from its standing as an American capital, broadly construed.

Flavell's London is both an inescapable part of American consciousness in the eighteenth century and a space for alternative possibilities to those that obtained in the colonies. For Robert, who was an enslaved person in the household of Henry Laurens, London offered the possibility (and ultimately the reality) of escape from his status as human property. For Henry himself, it offered the possibility of his financial success in South Carolina, transforming into genuine respectability and status in a society whose good opinion he valued. For Henry's son John, it offered the possibility of a scientific calling, even as his father encouraged him to seek out a higher-status career in the law – a career also made possible by his schooling in London. John's pursuit of schooling in the law has the effect of exposing him to ideas that create tensions with his slave-owning father, and one of Flavell's most fascinating and provocative points is her discussion of how southern slave-owners from the colonial South were represented in ways that resembled contemporary depictions of British colonial merchants in the East Indies. Both South Carolinian and Jamaican plantation owners and the colonial administrators of the East India Company in South Asia were described in British popular fiction as being tyrants seduced by power and luxury away from native English virtues like thrift and prudence. The influence of British liberalism served to push John Laurens into a position critical of the slavery that enabled his family's rise to wealth and influence, and it also served to give him resources for an increasing conviction of the value of an independent American identity. Paradoxically, as Flavell points out, John's time in London contributed in the end to solidifying his identity as an American, and his early death came as a soldier and aide to George Washington in the American Revolution.

As prominent as they were on the London social scene, southerners like the Laurens family did not monopolize London at the expense of all other Americans. To illustrate the fortunes of Yankees in London, Flavell uses the example of Stephen Sayre, a “farmer's son from Long Island whose adventures seemed for a time to mirror the fabled career of Dick Whittington” (115). Sayre was a sort of prototypical hustler, finding ways to rise in London society by adopting the manners of a gentleman, and he managed to rise and fall several times before finally being forced into exile as the result of a bizarre alleged plot to kidnap King George. Sayre attempted, successfully, to rise in London society through the adaptation of gentlemanly manners, and he worked his way into the favor of numerous London patrons. In entering London society, moreover, he ended up finding his way back to other portions of America, becoming involved in the management of Caribbean plantations and transatlantic business concerns. London was not just an alternative to America; it was a bridge between various parts of the Americas. The porous boundaries between Englishness and Americanness find expression, for Flavell, in Sayre's career through his involvement with the emerging movement for American rights. Sayre developed connections with a colorful leading advocate of American rights, the morally ambiguous John Wilkes. Having been an advocate and sometime alleged conspirator for American rights in England, by the end of his life Sayre was living in America but was identified in his neighbor's consciousness with England – Flavell reveals that in his later years, this native New Englander was referred to by his New Jersey neighbors as “the handsome Englishman,” thus illustrating the fluidity of transatlantic identities, even after the Revolution (163).

Flavell's consideration of the role that America and Americans played in shaping London itself is among the most fascinating portions of her study. American commodities were vital to the very shape of the society that Americans found when they traveled to London, most strikingly in its material dimensions. Flavell examines the ways in which American trees and plants helped to shape landscape design in eighteenth-century England and the ways in which commodities from the Americas like sugar and tobacco rearranged the lifestyles of eighteenth-century Britons. Not only did Americans who were visiting or living in London contribute to the social landscape themselves; they entered a world in which the physical landscape was also shaped by America. Americans contributed in a very important way, meanwhile, to the diversity of England, as the result of Native American and especially African American visitors and immigrants to London and the contribution that they made to the cultural landscape of the capital.

Benjamin Franklin is a crucial touchstone for Flavell. She finds that Franklin exemplifies perfectly the ambivalence with which Americans regarded London in the years leading up to and even during the American Revolution. Franklin's second visit to London, as Flavell relates, was a remarkably unsuccessful venture, in some ways because of the very social landscape that Flavell describes throughout her study. The leading Americans in London were wealthy scions of good families from the plantation economy of the American South, and Franklin was marked in his manners and biography as a self-made man who could never quite be a gentleman. As a result, Franklin struggled initially to negotiate the social networks of 1750s London, and he came off rather the worse in his discussions with the Penns, the by-now genteel family who exercised proprietary control over the colony of Pennsylvania. If Franklin struggled with the social context of the capital, he was more successful in fitting into the networks of knowledge that circulated in London. He was recognized by the scientific community in London for his experiments with electricity. He never, however, received the kind of adulation in London that he was to receive in Paris. In this, his contemporary, the artist Benjamin West, presents an instructive contrast for Flavell, in that West proved rather more adept than Franklin himself at gaining the respect that Franklin desired in London. Franklin's ambiguous role in London illustrates for Flavell the ways in which the hierarchies in the colonies, and indeed the hierarchies in American history that we tend to impose when looking backward, are by no means inevitable in the eighteenth-century cosmopolitan center of London. Flavell illustrates once again the extremely fine line between Americanness and Englishness in eighteenth-century London through the divergence of Benjamin Franklin's career from that of his Loyalist son William.

Flavell's study illustrates beautifully the movement of individuals and families between London and America. Because her study focusses on the social rather than the cultural aspects of history, however, one could at times wish for more in the way of an examination of the circulation of texts as well as bodies between the metropolitan center of London and the colonial North American periphery. One wonders how the fortunes of Royall Tyler's The Contrast, an American play that enjoyed significant success in London, or Susanna Haswell Rowson's Charlotte Temple, or even Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God or Ann Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse, might interact with the stories of Americans on the move in London that Flavell relates here, but the mobility of these texts is part of another story, and will require another study than this for their significance as markers of circulation between London and North America to be fully explored. What Flavell has done, however, is to establish quite clearly and vividly the rich transatlantic context in which these works circulated and the global backdrop of this transatlantic context.

Eve Tavor Bannet provides precisely the literary dimension that is largely in the background in Flavell's study. She devotes the first half of her book to the texts that lay bare the uncertainty and even poverty that could face sailors and merchants in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, and the second half discusses the Atlantic as seen by servants of all races. If Flavell analyzes the circulations of human bodies, Bannet analyzes the circulations of texts and their interactions with the material worlds that form Flavell's subject matter. A novel like Robinson Crusoe, for example, which we now tend to experience as a unified text with one, definite, canonical author, Daniel Defoe, was in the eighteenth century a much less clearly determinate text. Instead, it circulated as a cluster of texts with varying degrees of resemblance to Defoe's original, and certain of the culturally interesting aspects of Robinson Crusoe are, as Bannet, drawing on the work of Gerard Genette, suggests, paratextual rather than textual. That is, the printing history, the circulation, the promotion, and the reception history of the novel matter as much for our interpretation of its cultural significance as the text of the novel itself.

An especially interesting aspect of Bannet's treatment of Robinson Crusoe and the epitomes derived from it is the degree to which the Crusoe with whom most people at the present time grew up is a nineteenth-century rather than an eighteenth-century Crusoe. She notes that in the nineteenth century, most epitomes highlighted the hardworking individual living alone on an island, whereas eighteenth-century Crusoes tended to be social, public, and networked. She points out, moreover, that eighteenth-century epitomes tended both to increase the level of specificity associated with Crusoe's circulations and to make evident “the fluid identities of Englishmen in the Atlantic before Britannia ruled the waves” (34). From these considerations of the varying forms that Crusoe's story could take, Bannet moves through a tour of the mobility of the poor in the Atlantic world. She reads the romances of captivity by Penelope Aubin as bringing together questions of race, slavery, and gender; and as with the Crusoe epitomes, she finds that they were reappropriated in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the service of then-contemporary agendas (particularly anti-slavery, in the case of Aubin). Bannet concludes her discussion of the poor person's Atlantic with an illuminating analysis of an American text that has become increasingly important in recent scholarship: Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive. Bannet argues that reading Tyler's novel in context with the various transatlantic texts that she considers demonstrates that its radical potential as an anti-slavery text in its time was greater than is often realized in ours.

In keeping with the anti-slavery resonances in the works of Aubin and Tyler, the second section of Bannet's study is built around the circulations of servants. She performs an important service by recovering Edward Kimber's The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson (1754) as a counterpart to Robinson Crusoe and other earlier transatlantic novels. This novel of transatlantic male indentured servitude provides a frame for Bannet's consideration of works featuring women under sexual threat because of their servitude and of the autobiographies of men of color, from African men narrating their movement from slavery to freedom to the transatlantic itinerary of Samson Occom. Bannet closes her study by analyzing the “printer's revolution” epitomized by the reprints of British works created by Robert Bell and the way in which Bell enabled these works to be read against the British and in the American grain. Throughout her study, then, Bannet emphasizes the thematic fluidity of a variety of texts with transatlantic circulation, especially through the paratextual apparatus that both enabled and was created by their circulation.

Bannet's work interacts in interesting ways with the recent work on the fluidity of texts in nineteenth-century American literature by John Bryant, whose The Fluid Text: A Theory of Textual Editing (2002) and whose work with Herman Melville's first novel Typee and his posthumous novella Billy Budd make similar points about the instability of seemingly fixed and authoritative texts. It is also a worthy successor to Cathy Davidson's field-defining study Revolution and the Word (1986), which transformed the study of the early American novel by focussing on paratextual details like marginalia, inscriptions, and library circulation records. Bannet extends this paratextual emphasis still further by making use of abridgments, epitomes, and a variety of responses that go beyond the physical book itself. Her emphasis on trans- and circum-Atlantic movement, meanwhile, allows for a level of attention to matters of race, slavery, cultural contact, and economics that extends the range of thematic possibilities for transatlantic studies of the medium of the book.

The cultural, racial, economic, and literary dimensions of transatlanticism also meet in Bridget Marshall's The Transatlantic Gothic and the Law. Marshall explores those dimensions of transatlantic Gothicism and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American law which connect most closely with race, slavery, and imperialism, both British and American. The structure of Marshall's study forms a kind of diptych, with two chapters devoted to transatlantic works that are conventionally identified as “American,” and two chapters devoted to works that are conventionally “British.” This structure allows Marshall to demonstrate the interpenetration of the two seemingly distinct national and literary identities. Marshall's version of transatlanticism is the most distinctively textual of any of the studies considered here. The circulation in this case is the circulation of legal doctrines, and of a widely held suspicion of these same legal doctrines. The transatlantic relationship here is one of analogy, occasionally complemented by the circulation of characters and of literary influence.

Marshall begins with the novel that necessarily defines the relationship between the Gothic and legal discourse, William Godwin's Caleb Williams. As she points out, this novel is fundamentally concerned with matters of law and justice. Marshall suggests that the structure of Caleb Williams as a whole calls attention to all the ways in which things are not as they should be in the socioeconomic world of late eighteenth-century England and that Godwin uses legal devices to reflect upon fundamental injustices in British society. As the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and a representative of the politically radical wing of the Romantic movement in Britain, Mary Shelley is a natural match for Godwin. She is likewise concerned in Frankenstein with the gaps and injustices in the British legal system, and her novel reveals the gaps and insufficiencies in the administration of justice.

In examining the Gothicism of Charles Brockden Brown, himself a student of the law, Marshall finds important analogies to his British contemporaries. Marshall shows that Edgar Huntly, Brown's most American novel, nonetheless addresses points of significant continuity between the legal systems on opposite sides of the Atlantic. One unfortunate attribute of the focus on Edgar Huntly is that we miss some of the transatlantic perspective provided by works like Wieland and Carwin, the Biloquist, but Marshall's work here opens up some new possibilities for considering Brown's other writings. In particular, Marshall's suggestion that Edgar Huntly calls attention to the legal exploitation and dispossession of American Indians using forms parallel to those employed by Godwin and Shelley opens up new possibilities for transatlantic inquiry, even as her consideration of Clitheroe's transatlantic tale points toward Brown's wider representations of transatlantic circulation.

Perhaps the most surprising of the connections that Marshall makes between the Gothic and the law appears in her consideration of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, bringing mid-nineteenth-century American slavery into a transatlantic context. As with her discussion of Brown, Marshall suggests here that the American difference in the relationship between the Gothic and the law appears especially in relation to questions of race, with the stress falling on the dispossession of American Indians in Brown's novel, and on the enslavement of African Americans in Crafts's novel. For Marshall, African American narratives provide an especially meaningful link not just between transatlantic literary productions, but particularly between the imagined horrors of the Gothic and the real-world constraints of property law when it is applied to human beings. Marshall's study clearly shows congruencies between representations of the law in British and American novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and thus makes an important contribution both to law and literature scholarship and to transatlantic literary scholarship. An opening that is left for more work in the future is for a transatlantic law and literature approach that emphasizes circulation as well as comparison.

Flavell, Marshall, and Bannet have presented us with a kind of transatlanticism of convenience, where economics and national and linguistic identity blend to create material and literary circulations between England and North America, and through English imperial networks around the world. Katherine Carte Engel, meanwhile, presents us with a transatlanticism that is a matter of religious ideology rather than of national identity, and she, along with Patrick Erben, whose work is also discussed below, remind us that transatlanticism in British North America was not a purely anglophone affair. Engel's Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America narrates the development of Moravianism as an ecumenical movement that was inherently transatlantic, as a missionary venture that created closer ties among European and indigenous Americans than any of its counterparts, and as an experiment in communal economics that proved paradoxically profitable in the context of emerging eighteenth-century capitalism. Engel traces the transformation of Moravianism from a movement seeking ecumenical renewal within European Christianity to a missionary movement devoted almost entirely to work among non-Europeans, and from a closed communal economy to a model for success in the emerging market economy.

There is an elegiac feel to the story that Engel tells, which is particularly appropriate within the frame of transatlanticism, as the Moravians inexorably move from being one of the most unusual, mystical, and intellectually and spiritually adventurous religious groups in early America to being a highly successful moneymaking concern. Engel deftly illustrates the ways in which a set of theological commitments that are resolutely nonmaterialistic and nonsectarian and cosmopolitan were inevitably drawn into a necessary investment in capital on the part of what was increasingly becoming a specific denomination that was regionally defined within distinct European, North American, and Caribbean locales rather than an ecumenical movement that was globally defined. Engel neither condemns nor celebrates this particular movement; rather, she meticulously documents it, suggesting that this trajectory is in itself revealing in both its religious and economic aspects.

The story of the Moravians as told by Engel thus illustrates the tension between transoceanic aspiration and local reality: the Moravian community was devoted to an exceptionally unworldly variety of faith, and yet the maintenance of that faith required substantial trade and commercial activity. The Moravian community inclined toward a system of communal ownership, but this form of ownership slowly declined until it was ultimately dissolved. The Moravians attempted to weave together their mission to the North American Indians, their missionary work in the West Indies, and their communitarian societies in North America and Europe, but ultimately each of these strands in the Moravian project proved inconsistent with the others, even as the Moravians provided one of the more impressive communitarian and ecumenical models of the eighteenth century at times.

Like Engel's study, Patrick Erben's A Harmony of Spirits self-consciously points to an eighteenth-century Antlantic world that was multilingual and contained religious movements that were unknown in England, even as Erben draws respectfully upon earlier works of transatlanticist scholarship like Eve Tavor Bannet's Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Experience, 1680–1820 (2005) in order to provide a conceptual framework for his study. Erben is more specifically engaged by the multilingual qualities of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and their wider import than is Engel. Rather than focussing only on the self-consciously cosmopolitan Moravians, Erben makes the seemingly more provincial Mennonites, Dunkers, and Schwenkfelders equally central foci of his discussion of the Pennsylvania German community and its relation to anglophone contemporaries. Unlike the Moravians, groups like the Mennonites, Dunkers, and Schwenkfelders positioned themselves from the start as highly distinctive communities within the world of Atlantic Christianity, emphasizing communal traits like adult baptism, pacifism, and simplicity above all else. Even more than Mennonites and Moravians as specific religious communities, Erben is interested in the ways in which the transnational and multi-confessional Pietist and Quaker communities interacted in Pennsylvania across the boundaries of language and religious institutions.

Erben's Pennsylvania is a stunningly multilingual environment, bringing together the English Quakers and German Pietists with the Delaware Indians whom they were trying to convert. Erben brilliantly demonstrates how religion, language, and affect come together in the interrelationships among nations, faiths, and individuals. Erben explains that a major goal of both the Quakers and the Pietists was to overcome the alienating effects of the division of human languages at the Tower of Babel, and he ties together his readings of a wide array of English and German texts with this key insight. He finds that William Penn and his translators, including most notably the dazzling German polymath and polyglot Franz Daniel Pastorius, sought to find ways to heal the divisions created by linguistic and cultural difference in the name of Christian harmony. Indeed, Erben places the restoration of linguistic harmony at the core of the Pennsylvania experiment, tracking questions of language through the Keithian controversy among Quakers and through the polyglot writings of Pastorius, and suggesting that the experiential multilingualism of the Pennsylvania community was closely tied to the theological emphasis on linguistic reconciliation that prevailed among English-speaking Quakers and German-speaking Pietists alike.

This multilingualism is especially apparent in the Ephrata Cloister, one of the more unusual manifestations of visionary religion in colonial Pennsylvania. The community at Ephrata had roots in the German Pietist movement, and particularly in the German Baptist Brethren, who traced their origins to Schwarzenau, Germany, and the mass baptism of its founders by immersion – leading to the appellation of Dunker, which became the common name in North America for this denomination. Because of their practice of adult baptism and their pacifism the Dunkers were already well outside the religious mainstream, but the Ephrata Cloister went well beyond even more mainstream Dunkers, embracing celibacy and a rigorous simplicity of life along with an intellectually and aesthetically adventurous mysticism. About the Ephrata Cloister and their intermingling of verbal, visual, and musical art in their Fraktur illustrations of their musical compositions, Erben writes, with great elegance, “What the illustrators beautifully revealed on the manuscript page was nothing less than the interpenetration of all forms of existence as a common, spiritual text” (228). This harmonic blending of the linguistic, visual, and aural served to connect the Brethren at the Ephrata Cloister to the Moravian Brethren, whose early mysticism about language was cognate with that at Ephrata in some significant ways.

Erben finds the Mennonites' Martyr's Mirror to be especially reflective (to indulge a pun) of the manner in which the multireligious and multilingual came together in colonial Pennsylvania. Written in Dutch (a minority language among the Mennonites relative to German) and translated into both German and English, this text created a sense of community among the Mennonites themselves and also among the more radical members of German-speaking Pietist groups in early Pennsylvania, notably including the Ephrata Cloister, which provided the German-language translation of the Dutch Mennonite Thieleman van Braght's Martyr's Mirror. Moreover, the fact that the Martyr's Mirror was translated in order to reinforce Mennonite pacifism indicates the way in which linguistic and religious questions of difference were mutually reinforcing: both Mennonites and Quakers found themselves persecuted for their pacifist views during the American Revolution, and this very suffering served to collapse linguistic difference between the two groups, calling both back to shared spiritual values. One of the most impressive attributes of Erben's work is his ability to show how temporal necessity and religious ideology interpenetrate in the cosmopolitan linguistic and theological environment of early Pennsylvania.

Erben does so much to redefine the parameters of discussion for colonial English and German literary culture in early Pennsylvania that it is a little surprising when he does accept previous nomenclatures a little too easily. For example, with regard to the Keithian controversy in seventeenth-century Pennsylvania, he maintains the conventional distinction between Keithian and “orthodox” Quakers, despite noting in a footnote that the term “orthodox” appears to be misapplied in describing the controversy. It seems that it would be more in keeping with the bold and groundbreaking qualities of the study as a whole to reevaluate the use of the Keithian/orthodox opposition explicitly in the body of the text. Another place where Erben's work here points to future possibilities for scholarship is in the area of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania German print culture: Erben's discussion of transnational reformers like Comenius suggests the possible significance of considerations of a local Pennsylvanian educational text like Christopher Dock's Schulordnung (1751), which is in dialogue with European reformers even as it is plainly situated among the German-speaking people of Pennsylvania. Indeed, the possibilities of literary scholarship on eighteenth-century Pennsylvania German writing are enormous, and thanks to Erben and Engel, we are able to see the outlines of a field of vast prospects.

The cumulative effect of these five studies is to open up our sense of the Atlantic as an astonishingly diverse and fertile context for inquiry, one in which literature, religion, culture, economics, and language interpenetrate and recombine in the most unlikely and complex of ways. Links among the North American colonies and the Caribbean; between both and Africa; and among English speakers, German speakers, and speakers of indigenous languages; as well as links crossing class, racial, and regional lines, all appear and reappear throughout these studies. We are indebted to Flavell, Bannet, Marshall, Engel, and Erben for providing the outlines of an Atlantic that is thoroughly diverse in its plenitude of cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic identities and relations. In these five books, transnationalism in American studies is not an aspiration, but a fundamental fact.