By way of a Hacker News post, I learned of this great post by Greg Bayer:

Moving Files from one Git Repository to Another, Preserving History

I’ve actually had a couple of cases where I’ve wanted to move some files and keep the history. I couldn’t easily figure it out and opted to just copy the files into the new repo and lose the history. This looks like a workable solution instead. Thanks to Greg Bayer for writing it up.

P.S. a comment to the HN post also mentions this “git-subtree” tool, which does look interesting.