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This article situates the idea of ‘transnational history’ within the recent historiography of the United States, as both a reaction against and accommodation to the nation-state focus of that historiography. It explains transnational history's specific American development as a broad project of research to contextualize US history and decentre the nation; it explores the conditions of American historical practice that influenced the genesis and growth of this version of transnational history; and it compares the concept with competitor terms such as international history, comparative history, global history, histoire croisée, and trans-border. In the United States, transnational history came to be considered complementary to these concepts in its commitment to render American historiography less parochial, yet, because of its origins, the concept has remained limited in application by period and spatial scope. While the concept retains utility because of its specific research programme to denaturalize the nation, transnational history understood as an exploration of ‘transnational spaces’ opens possibilities for an approach of more general historiographical relevance.

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The rise of support for national parks in the United States after 1900 occurred amid a transnational circulation of information on the apparent destruction of – or imminent threat to – nature on a global level. Arguments for creating and protecting national parks included preservation of “wild” areas, proto-ecological ideas, and social reformist and economic utilitarian pressures during the Progressive Era. Advocacy for park protection as it developed to 1916 reflected this complex cluster of ideas rather than any clearly articulated concept of wilderness. It was influenced by international sensibilities on the social construction of nature and its putative preservation at the moment of industrialization in Europe and the American Northeast, the intrusion of mechanization into the countryside and, outside the metropolitan centres of the Euro-American world, high imperialism that exposed widespread destruction of nature in Europe's colonies. The case of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS), an elite organization that combined national park, public-park and human-heritage advocacy in a continuum of values, is examined as a transnational conduit for and shaper of these socially constructed ideas in the United States, and as a neglected aspect of Progressive Era development of national parks.