“’But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950. Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Dec. 1999), pp. 1045-1077.

== Summary ==
In this article, Robin D.G. Kelley contends that
scholarship of African American history during the first part of the 20th
century offers important insights for current efforts to “internationalize
American History. The work of scholars on black history was deeply ensconced
with a diasporic vision and shaped by antiracist and anti-imperialist politics
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such black scholars as George
Washington Williams, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin, W.E.B. Dubois, and
C.L.R. James, while not sharing the same political vision per se, were all
trying to figure out the global implications of the black experience. “Taken
together,” Kelley writes, “they offered a different framework for understanding
United States history, and the history of the West in general, but – much to
the impoverishment of American history – their work had been dismissed or
overlooked by the mainstream historical profession.” (1048)  African American history was always
global/transnational history.