“Race and Racism beyond National Borders”

Assembling a special collection of previously published articles has created an opportunity to engage with the legacy of Journal of World History. As with the first of these issues four years ago, I took the opportunity to review our “most downloaded” articles list from Project Muse. It has changed more than I expected – not only from the arrival of newlypublished articles but also from articles published decades ago that have gained new prominence. One of those served as the launching point for this collection, Matthew Pratt Guterl’s “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910-1925,” a “top 10” article for 2022, though it was first published in 1999. The renewed interest in race and racism is hardly unique to Journal of World History, much less global audiences in this particular historical moment. However, looking to JWH for an article on racism in America may not be the first stop on anyone’s pursuit of more information on the topic. For much of its history, JWH only published a few articles with American content. After all, a focus on America did not easily fit within JWH’s stated goal of transnational and comparative research, but Guterl’s article (the first of his two in our journal)1 easily met this threshold. Guterl begins his article with W. E. B. Du Bois’s arrival in the United Kingdom for the First Universal Races Congress and uses this moment as a launching point to analyze changing attitudes toward the conception of Irish American and African American national identities in the late Progressive Era. Focusing on the ways these identities engaged with a