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The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field
Thomas W. Zeiler
| An era of innovation among historians of American foreign relations is upon us. Gone are the days when, in 1980, Charles S. Maier could claim that social and cultural history had marginalized the state, implicitly relegating the "languishing" field of diplomatic history to the status of "stepchild" to serious historical scholarship.1 Grievances against departments that supposedly refuse to hire diplomatic historians or against journals that seemingly shut us out are increasingly rare. The relationship of the field to the profession is no longer characterized by the tired, anecdotal saw of exclusion. Instead, historians of U.S. foreign relations are, in many ways, an advance guard driving the bandwagon of internationalization, riding along with those who study mentalités and culture. And that relationship has been reciprocal: while the recent story of U.S. diplomatic history rests on its merger with the majority, the mainstream has also reached out to us. |
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This essay looks at how, over the past two decades, the study of U.S. foreign relations has stood at the intersection of the domestic and international, of theory and empiricism, of security/politics and the cultural turn. Diplomatic history is a clearinghouse of sorts for work on America in the world, and I seek to illustrate how a sample of diplomatic historians approach their field in ways both new and consistent with trends in the profession at large.2 This article will consider three (not mutually exclusive) areas in which reform has enlivened the field: traditional realism's engagement with ideology (mentalités), the embrace of international history, and the study of culture and identity. These reforms have redefined the field in ways that confirm the movement of diplomatic history into the mainstream of the historical profession's interests, and vice versa. |
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| The integration of the field into the larger discipline represents a methodological shift, but it also reveals changing interests of the profession. The field welcomed the international history project launched under the Organization for American Historian's La Pietra Report, although that endeavor was undertaken with surprisingly scant participation by historians of American foreign relations. Perhaps it is more accurate to argue, then, that diplomatic historians ride shotgun on the bandwagon of internationalization, rather than steer it entirely. Regardless, the La Pietra effort and the excitement over transnationalism show clearly that the domain once occupied primarily by historians of U.S. foreign relations is now also populated by other practitioners of American history. Revealing of this integration, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the flagship organization for diplomatic history, recently honored the borderlands historian Brian DeLay with its prize for best article for his essay on Indians and the Mexican- American War in the American Historical Review.3 |
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