In contrast to the mainstream of U.S. historiography during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American historians of the period, such as George Washington Williams and W. E. B. DuBois, adopted a transnational perspective.
Central Topic / Purpose
African American historians / Highlight Noteworthy in 1870 - 1930 or Answer a Question
Main Point
Instead of the national perspective that mainstream historians had, Black historians were distinctive for having a transnational perspective. Why? For several reasons ... (felt estranged from U.S. citizenship and were instead writing the history for a nation of black people who originated from Africa but were now dispersed across the globe in many nations).
Passage Map
P1 - establishes the contrast between mainstream US historians (nationalist perspective) and black U.S. historians (transnational perspective).
P2 - discusses the fuzzy citizenship status of Black Americans and how that created a large emigrationist sentiment.
P3 - discusses the imperialist nationalism of mainstream US historians and how that made Black historians leery.
P4 - provides the author's takeaways, that the Black historians were doing their own sort of nationalism, but rather than writing the history of a nation, they were writing the history of a "nation of people", black people who came from a glorious African past and now were scattered across the globe.
Other Commentary
The first sentence presents as a possible thesis for two reasons: - Many passages that Clarify a Misconception or Highlight Something Noteworthy begin with language like - The second sentence immediately starts to unpack the first.
So we would encode, presumptively, that the Main Point is .
The second paragraph begins "First, ...", which alerts us to the fact that we are getting the first of the several reasons foreshadowed in the second sentence of the passage. Seeing again that we are fleshing out reasons for the first sentence of the passage would solidify our suspicion that the first sentence was the thesis.
Curiously, the author never uses a "Second, furthermore, moreover" to advance her list of several reasons. Instead, the 2nd and 3rd paragraph combine to give us a sense of the reasons why Black historians of the time had a transnational perspective.
The last paragraph moves on from listing reasons and begins the author's evaluation, signified by the classic Author's Pivot (but / yet / however / recently) that so frequently introduces the Author's voice or main point.
The word 'diaspora' was not one I knew when first reading this, but from context and outside knowledge, it's basically referring to the people and culture of "Post-African" black people around the world. They don't have a sovereign territory or official language, but these black historians felt as though this group of people still constitutes a "nationality" in some sense.
Basically, even if force and circumstance had inserted these people into different nations around the world, the common homeland of their ancestry made them a community (a diasporic community seems to be a physically discontinuous community ... a local high school basketball team's fans form a 'traditional' community, whereas LA Lakers' fans form a 'diasporic' community, because Lakers fans are spread out around the world).