Prominent historian Alan Taylor updates and summarizes scholarly advancements in the historiography of American colonialism in this short essay.

This essay traces the changing field of the history of the United States in the world, moving through the "cultural turn" and the "transnational turn" of historiography up to the present.

The scholarship of environmental history has grown into a major historiographical field of study within the past 20 years, and Sarah T. Phillips looks at how this emerging field has been applied within the broader context of American history.

For better or for worse, capitalism is the philosophy that has come to define the United States. In this intriguing essay, Beckert takes a look at the historiography of American capitalism, which has been, according to Beckert, ironically neglected by historians until recently.

The studies of women and gender are historiographical fields that have benefited greatly from the cultural turnof the past 20 years. In this essay, Edwards surveys recent scholarship in these burgeoning fields, and illustrates effectively how many previous assumptions, especially pertaining to women's history, have been overturned.

Mae M. Ngai takes an in-depth look at the recent changes in immigration history, another field that has benefited from the transnational turn, which has pushed scholarship beyond the traditional study of white Europeans and placed new emphasis on ethnicity, worldwide patterns of migration, diaspora, and hybridity.

The study of Native Americans has expanded greatly within the past 20 years. Ned Blackhawk looks at the recent historiography in this field, and shows how this expanding focus has reshaped significantly the larger field of American history.

Diving into the murky waters of recent history, Phillips-Fein takes an intriguing look at scholarship in American history of the past 40-plus years, and discovers an era starting to develop a distinction of its own beyond the previous post-World War IIclassification.