A colleague of mine (Arissa Oh, Boston College) tells me that there are two kinds of history. The first is “need-to-know”: what academic historians feel compelled to learn, research, and teach, the meat and potatoes that makes its way onto graduate-school qualifying exam lists and faculty hiring priorities. The second is “nice-to-know”: the fields and topics that strike many as sidetracks to grand narratives and major historiographical debates – the metaphorical parsley garnishes. For many, Asian American history falls into the latter category.

Enter The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, a forceful rebuttal that makes a compelling argument for Asian American history as “need-to-know” history. The Handbook comprises twenty-eight essays, penned by established and emerging scholars, that together offer a wide-reaching assessment of the state of the field. Arranged thematically, the individual chapters mine the richness of Asian American historiography written since the transnational and cultural turns of the 1990s. The results yield great dividends for both Asian American history-heads and those unfamiliar with the literature.

A signal contribution of the Handbook is its epistemological wrestling, its intentional interrogations of contingent categories and analytical boundaries. The opening section, “Migration Flows,” immediately foregrounds this by asking, what is Asian American history? Who are the subjects of this history? What are its driving questions, and ambitions? Where are the field's horizons?

It is striking that the first chapter highlights Pacific Islanders. By considering these actors alongside Filipino/as, another significant group of colonial subjects, author Keith L. Camacho shows how such connections open up fresh ways for understanding US history as one of “American Empire.” Other chapters in this section likewise call for capacious approaches to “Asian American” history. These include a “hemispheric” model, encompassing Latin America and the Caribbean, and “Asian Canadian” history.

In various ways, the contributors underscore the stakes of thinking bigly and urgently. Sunaina Maira's essay on South Asian American studies (including history), for instance, discusses the “theoretical and political critique” (51) at the heart of the work that has “opened up or reframed core debates” in Asian American studies. One of the most important is how “regimes of surveillance, detention, and deportation in the War on Terror are reshaping political subjectivity and racial categories” (51). True to the founding spirit of Asian American studies, this is academic research consciously fashioned as “public scholarship and political intervention” (65).

The second and third sections, “Time Passages” and “Variations on Themes,” showcase the fields’ historiographical trends. “Time Passages” appraises periodizations both long-studied (Asiatic exclusion, World War II Japanese American internment) and more recently plumbed (the Cold War, the Asian American movement of the 1960s–1970s) – revealing the vitality in both rewriting familiar narratives and plotting new chronological territory.

“Variations on Themes” zooms in on lines of inquiry that are increasingly captivating historians’ attention: international adoption, racial/state violence, empire, war, queer lives. This section in particular evinces most clearly their engagement with Asian Americanists from other disciplinary backgrounds, American studies, and other kindred fields. As Lon Kurashige observes, Asian American historians buck the trend of theory-shy US historians in favor of joining theoretical innovation with empirical rigor (238). Since the 1990s, this has played out in five “interconnected, conceptual orbits”: culture and discourse, nationalism and the state, diaspora and transnationalism, urbanism and interminority relations, and biopolitics and sexuality (244).

“Engaging Historical Fields,” the Handbook’s final section, charts the two-way “integration” between Asian American history and “mainstream historiographies” (6). As the essays document, Asian Americanists have made uneven inroads into various subfields. Some have been very prominent (immigration, legal history, urban history), while others remain less so (religion, education, public history). Orthodox treatments of “political history” and “intellectual history” have relegated Asian American history to the edges of those respective subfields. But the contributors suggest that by adopting more expansive imaginings of the “political” and the “intellectual,” Asian American history brings to light fresh perspectives on power relations and ideas past.

All told, editors Yoo and Azuma celebrate the “breakthrough[s]” that Asian American historiography has made both within and outside US history. They confidently predict that in the coming years, Asian American history will become more and more “relevant” to “mainstream” US history and various area studies fields (6).

There is a Whiggish optimism here, one that I share. But it does lead me to wonder: should academic assimilation necessarily be the field's primary goal today? How does that square with the original, unabashed intent of Asian American studies to produce “engaged” knowledge as a way to achieve “liberation, justice, and equity” (1)? I'd like to think that the two are not in contradiction, and that the criteria for “need-to-know” history are open to the methodological, conceptual, and ideological diversity that Asian American historiography has proven to be so generative of.