In their introduction to this fine collection of essays, Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow point out that, in spite of two decades of theorizing, strict definitions of the “international” and the “transnational” have yet to be established by historians of the United States. In an effort to overcome this theoretical lacuna, the editors convincingly posit that “while international history privileges relations among states, transnational history examines relations among peoples below the state level” (3). This simple but functional distinction allows the book's contributors to make the case for both international and transnational methodologies in tackling a wide range of problems in American historiography.

Several essays take an international approach to their subject matter. Daniel Sargent provides a sweeping view of America's relationship with the world between the 1840s and the 1990s, arguing that the paradox of globalization in American history is that “the United States has taken greatest responsibility for international economic governance when actual interdependence with the larger global economy has been the least” (38). Other chapters examine narrower case studies, such as the international reception of the Monroe Doctrine (Jay Sexton), the position of North Carolina politician Luther Hodges in the transatlantic circuitry of neoliberal economic policy formation (Elizabeth Tandy Shermer), and the “dirty war network” that emerged amongst French, US and Latin American conservatives during the Cold War (Rossinow). Each of these essays provides new ways of conceptualizing how US policymaking has been shaped by local, national and international influences that have intersected in a range of unexpected ways.

The essays that adopt a transnational approach are equally revealing. Leslie Butler decodes the influence in late nineteenth-century America of English philosopher John Stuart Mill's writings on the woman question, for example, while Darren Dochuk examines the shifting intersections between religious and business interests as the US oil industry moved its attention away from the US Southwest and towards the Middle East after World War II. Melani McAlister uses American missionary work in Congo to argue that religious history needs to be understood in transnational context, and, more specifically, that “the raced body of evangelical internationalism has both a Cold War and a Third World genealogy” (144). Furthermore, Moshik Temkin takes the example of restrictions placed on US antiwar activists travelling to France in the Vietnam era to demonstrate how, at the same time as activist internationalism spiked in response to a globally unpopular military conflict, nation-states responded by using travel controls to emphasize their “exclusive domain” of sovereignty (262). These essays tell us much about the place of non-state actors in the development of US foreign relations, but also remind enthusiastic endorsers of transnationalism not to lose site of the nation-state and its continuing importance to modern US historians.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking essay in the collection is Minkah Makalani's on the relationship between black internationalism and communism in the years before and after World War II. He argues that the emergence of diasporic activism was crucial in providing a “global formation within which to challenge US racial politics through an anticolonial frame” (183). This meant that activists and thinkers centred their attention on the question of colonialism and its relevance to the African American experience. In developing this argument, Makalani adds texture to our already well-developed understanding of the intersections between US racial politics and the decolonizing world. But what is most interesting is his reluctance to even characterize his narrative as an American one. “I remain uncertain about the place of US political history in this diasporic story,” he suggests, before arguing that a distinctly “national frame” is inappropriate, and that it might be better to see US history as a subfield of African diasporic history, rather than the other way around (197–98).

Makalani's intervention reminds us that analogies of “networks” and “circuits,” whilst useful, only go so far in mapping the realities of international and transnational exchange. The same is true of discussions centring on directionality, such as that implied by Preston and Rossinow's title, Outside In. Their book is, perhaps, mistitled. In discussing the “transnational circuitry” of American history, its contributors demonstrate the inherent multidirectionality of links between the United States and the world. Whilst some move from the “outside in,” as the book's title suggests, others move from the “inside out,” or, indeed, problematize these very frames of reference. If the book is mistitled, then, it is because its constituent parts challenge us to fundamentally rethink our understandings of the geography and spatiality of American history. They will play an important role in defining the field for years to come.