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The Changing Face of Diplomatic History: A Literature Review
Brenda Gayle Plummer
University of Wisconsin-Madison
| SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 2004, departing Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed a luncheon meeting hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. Powell described to his Boston audience the readjustments that his cabinet post had imposed on him. "When I came into the job, it was an entirely different world than the world I left," he revealed. It was a world "with the Soviet Union gone and many of these new nations that used to be behind the Iron Curtain now anxious to develop a friendship with us."1 Powell went on to discuss how he was tested in the Middle East and Asia, and the universal dilemmas posed by poverty and AIDS. It was clear that simple bilateral diplomacy could no longer encompass the enormity of the world's challenges, and that foreign policy would adjust to reflect these changed circumstances. |
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Historical scholarship has recognized the vast variety and subtlety of world affairs that preoccupied Powell. We currently enjoy something of a renaissance in the study of foreign relations. As a sub-field of history, diplomatic history will always be concerned in great measure with power relations among states, and particularly with bilateral relations, but in the last few decades it has discovered new ways to reveal and interpret these. Several factors account for the growing interest in the area, often from unlikely contributors, and for the journey of diplomatic history from the periphery toward the center of the vital questions preoccupying historians today. Some of these factors have been noticed for years and have had a cumulative effect. Others would seem comparatively recent. This essay will focus on these new directions. |
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One factor is the greater ethnic and gender diversity of scholars. This was evident when a sea of varied faces looked back at panelists addressing the June 2003 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. That convention may have been the most representative of the United States population of any SHAFR meeting since the organization's beginnings. The range of topics paralleled the variety among participants. Robert Beisner's recent survey of the published research in the history of foreign relations also attests to the expanding parameters of the field, as diplomatic historians complement the traditional focus on bilateral relations with probing scholarship that puts those relations in broader context.2 For example, recent scholarship in the area is more prepared than ever to locate nongovernmental actors in the social and political context in which foreign policy is made and to enlarge our understanding of how they function in conventional institutional environments that have long defined decision making. As Saskia Sasson has argued,3 events subsequent to the tragedies at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have palpably demonstrated both the volatility of non-state actors, their challenge to the state system, and their ability to drive events. These questions are a central concern for Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History,4 where control of the state— a site of opportunity rather than security—is up for grabs.5 |
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The end of the Cold War has also decidedly affected how diplomatic history is written. The conflict had all too often locked historians into a binary worldview that refracted the rich history of the post-1945 period, including much about the Cold War itself. We are reminded of what we lost in that single-minded focus and what is to be regained from a wider focus in works like Penny M. Von Eschen's study, "Challenging Cold War Habits: African Americans, Race, and Foreign Policy;"6 Matthew Connelly, "Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict During the Algerian War for Independence;"7 and the essays in Allen Hunter's anthology, Rethinking the Cold War: Essays on Its Dynamics, Meaning, and Morality.8 |
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While some may argue that historiography has benefited from the termination of the East-West conflict, others suggest that the absence of clear ideological signposts has been a source of confusion and error for those who made foreign policy. Michel Feher, in Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community, criticizes the western democracies for their inept reactions to the genocide in the Balkans and in Rwanda during the 1990s.9 Policy makers excused their initial retreat from intervention, he asserts, on the dubious ground that historic ethnic antagonisms sparked the conflicts and that only an ex post facto humanitarian response to them was warranted. He asserts that the absence of Cold War rivalry had cooled the interest of the surviving great powers in these peripheral areas. As the killing intensified, they switched their positions at the cost of their own credibility. By ignoring the modern political character of these crises for so long, western officials wound up strengthening the old ethnic animosities. |
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The end of the Cold War and the subsequent relaxation of national security concerns opened decision-makers to intensified public scrutiny. The customary cloak of secrecy that they drew over themselves seemed irrelevant in what appeared, before September 11, 2001, to be a world in which disastrous superpower tensions no longer propelled events or threatened nuclear war. In that interregnum between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers, historians began to examine how officials react in an arena where they share space with "civilians." They increasingly defined such space as cultural space. New studies of the presidency illustrate this tendency. Alexander DeConde, in Presidential Machismo: Executive Authority, Military Intervention, and Foreign Relations,10 looks at presidential initiatives in foreign policy from the early republic to the present. The work represents the influence of gender studies on conventional diplomatic history. DeConde concentrates especially on armed interventions, noting how important it has been for the public to view the president as sufficiently manly in confronting perceived aggressors. Such domestic imperatives, the author suggests, underlay repeated presidential violation of constitutional constraints on acts of war. Other studies that privilege culture include J. M. Henning's Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-Japanese Relations;11 Jessica Gienow-Hecht's Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955;12 Emily S. Rosenberg's Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930;13 and Penny Von Eschen's Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.14 |
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This "cultural turn," as Robert Griffith calls it,15 is not alone in shaping trends in the history of foreign relations. Current events can have a powerful impact. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the mobilization of ethnicity and religion to pursue political objectives have contributed to a widespread disillusionment with nationalism among many thoughtful persons worldwide. As filtered through the academy, a critical stance toward nationalism resulted in some changes in United States historians' practices. The resulting interest in internationalizing history has led to question about concentrating on the United States as an essentially unique and solely pivotal player. |
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Following this wisdom, Michael Hunt has set goals for practitioners of the history of American foreign relations in his essay "Internationalizing U.S. Diplomatic History: A Practical Agenda."16 Hunt and others, such as Richard Pells, seek to extend the meaning of foreign relations beyond the customary bilateral confines into less insular, and more nuanced and comparative kinds of scholarship. American scholars, Pells writes, "would do well to get out of the country" and see it through the lenses of foreigners.17 Many historians are consequently interested in using multi-archival research, a practice that is not new, to broaden the conventional focus on bilateral relations. Employing multiple state papers can help identify global trends and concerns, and extend the comparative power of the method. A recent example of this application of multi-archival research is Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente.18 A work with a similar multinational orientation that relies less extensively on state papers, is D. A. Low, The Egalitarian Moment: Asia and Africa, 1950–1980.19 Arthur Marwick's The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States20 is a controversial foray into this approach. Of course, there are traps. One of them is the possibility that United States historians, eager to see America through the eyes of others, will wind up re-inscribing American exceptionalism and the belief will re-emerge, that the United States' experience is so unique that it cannot be understood in the same ways that we approach the history of other nations. These concerns are aired in Benjamin Lee, "Critical Internationalism," and Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Dominguez, "Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism."21 |
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One of the most widely noted phenomena in diplomatic history of late is its penetration by intellectual currents from other areas in history and from outside the discipline proper. These currents include colonial studies, American studies, anthropology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and feminist theory. Some of these fields owe their recent cachet to the post-Cold War liberalization of what is possible in the history of foreign relations by bringing the experiences of more of the world's people out of the periphery and into the mainstream of scholarly imagination. They have accordingly enabled a better understanding of the complexities of the state, and particularly its role in helping to reproduce belief systems, cultural practices, and power relationships in tandem with civil society and in interaction with other nations. This literature has become vast and contains important contributions from scholars whose insights are shaped by a historical imagination but who work outside the disciplinary field of history. Representative of the scope and variety of writing that is inspired by these fresh insights are Thomas Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture;22 Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital;23 Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left;24 and Nikhil Pal Singh, "Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy."25 |
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Readers will note in many of the titles above a focus on culture, which in the past did not greatly preoccupy students of foreign relations. In addition to contributions by political scientists, sociologists, and independent researchers, the interdisciplinary field of American studies increasingly adds to this area of scholarship. Nikhil Pal Singh's Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy,26 and Christian G. Appy's collection Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, are among recent noteworthy books.27 Culture is also a preoccupation of Jonathan Friedman in "Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarreling: Cosmopolitans Versus Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of De-Hegemonisation;"28 John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War;29 Ana Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda;"30 and Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism.31 |
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Feminist theory has had a significant impact on the history of foreign relations. One of its points of entry was the field of international relations where it has helped focus a long-standing unease that many scholars had felt with the assumptions underlying "IR" scholarship. Feminist interpretations took issue with its solipsistic rationality and its inability to account for a wide range of phenomena, including the interaction between the public and private, and the power relationships concealed behind gender invisibility. Several useful anthologies explore these themes and more, including Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King, eds., Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics;32 Peter R. Beckman and Francine D'Amico, eds., Women, Gender, and World Politics;33 and Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, eds., The "Man" Question in International Relations.34 V. Spike Peterson's "Feminist Theories Within, Invisible to, and Beyond IR," is also useful.35 V. Spike Peterson and Jacqui True, "New Times and New Conversations," in Zalewski and Parpart's The "Man" Question in International Relations,36 and Steve Smith, "'Unacceptable Conclusions' and the 'Man' Question: Masculinity, Gender, and International Relations," in the same collection, are typical works.37 |
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Feminist writers have also studied the "naturalized" language embedded in the way we think about diplomatic history, the gender hierarchies rooted in everyday speech and practice, and the prescriptions of the national security state. Perhaps the best known of these writers is Carol Cohn, a political scientist and former security analyst. Cohn's "Emasculating America's Linguistic Deterrent"38 was preceded by her noted essay, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals."39 She understands language to be the basis of how political ideologies are framed. In the case of the defense establishment, she argues that a phallic vocabulary of aggression, penetration, and mastery shapes how policy makers define and come to know their world. The political scientist Cynthia Enloe was an early leader in investigating not only the discursive terrain of gendered politics, but also its actual operation on the field of war by interrogating the invisibility of women. Her Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics40 is a classic in the field. Enloe has continued these investigations in The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire.41 |
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Historians Emily Rosenberg in "Foreign Affairs After World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics"42 and "Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the 'American Century;'"43 and Frank Costigliola in "The Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the Western Alliance"44 and "'Unceasing Pressure for Penetration': Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation"45 have examined how socialization to particular views of gender has contributed to policy makers' perceptions of the international community with which they deal. Ascribing stereotypical roles to nation-states, they suggest, has influenced United States attitudes toward specific countries. These may be masculine or feminine as determined along a continuum of such traits as bellicosity, cooperativeness, or attributed weakness. Assumptions about how men and women behave thus conditioned the vital link between the foreign and the domestic. Other broad-based studies have examined gender in the context of the Cold War, militarism, colonialism, and race relations.46 |
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Colonialism especially has provided many resources for fruitful studies in foreign relations. Scholars have investigated the cultural and ideological foundations of colonial practices and the consequences for the world of that form of political economy. Some, like Ann L. Stoler in "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures," have argued that colonialism, rather than being derived from singular and finite experiences of conquest and domination, has been intimately linked culturally with what now passes for modernity and, politically, with the nation-state. In other words, colonial practices helped to shape nationality and citizenship in the West.47 According to Jack Stauder,48 anthropology played a critical role in this process because, as a discipline it began in company with the imperial project of analyzing and controlling subject peoples. Students of colonialism have also criticized the theory of American exceptionalism that denies that the United States is a colonial power. For Stoler and Frederick Cooper the debate is sterile: "Metropole and colony are a single analytic field."49 The concept of informal empire has been used to grasp the distinctions between United States and European practices of domination. However, informal empire originally described situations in which Britain chose not to exert formal hegemony over dependent areas. In a recent application, Hazel M. McFerson's The Racial Dimension of American Overseas Colonial Policy explores the idea as it historically intersected with American views of race.50 |
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A related but much larger body of literature does not claim that the United States has been a colonial power, but instead examines American connections to the imperial policies of other leading states. Much of it focuses on periods of crisis, such as world wars, when regimes were undergoing change. Historians wish to know how the United States either helped undermine the status quo in dependent territories, or sought to uphold it or modify it, based on perceptions of self-interest in a specific context. Examples are Douglas Little, "Cold War and Colonialism in Africa: France, the United States, and the Madagascar Revolt of 1947;"51 Fraser, Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism, and the essays in David Ryan and Victor Pungong, eds., The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom.52 |
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Still another rapidly growing area in the history of foreign relations addresses the domestic and international impact of race. Like the scholarship discussed above, it relies substantially on an understanding of diplomacy as shaped not only by formal, bilateral communications between foreign offices, but as a product of a range of political and cultural responses, and as the result of non-governmental actors operating on the world stage. For United States historians, race has been an essential factor in the construction of the American experience. For diplomatic historians, this means recouping an often hidden history of the transnational engagements of people of color. |
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As Paul G. Lauren has documented in Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination,53 and Carol Anderson demonstrates in Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955,54 racial-ethnic minorities have used such bodies as the League of Nations and the United Nations to press human rights agendas on the foreign ministries of their respective home countries. Anti-colonialism merged with antiracism in both the domestic and foreign struggles of people of African descent for citizenship rights and racial equality. Cary Fraser explains this synthesis in Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism, and Michael L. Krenn describes how race became a personnel issue for the United States State Department in Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–1969.55 It became a Cold War concern once United States decision makers realized that discrimination hampered their broader policy objectives. The Cold War connection has been an increasingly studied subject as in Brenda Gayle Plummer's Rising Wind: Black Americans and U. S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960,56 Mary L. Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy,57 and Thomas Borstelmann's The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena.58 |
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The ubiquity of African Americans as a focus of the historical literature on race and diplomacy owes much to the proscription that forced this group to develop independent and oppositional institutions. These evolved at an early date, have been extensively documented, and thereby provide ample primary sources for scholarly use. African American Christian missions in Africa are among the best recorded. Here, proselytizers had first hand encounters with colonialism and often conveyed emancipatory messages to converts, as noted in Lawrence S. Little's Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 1884–1916.59 While an earlier historiography erroneously interpreted black nationalism and Pan-Africanism as essentially escapist and devoid of genuine internationalist content, more recent writers have understood and carefully reconstructed the underlying global vision in Garveyism and Muslim sects. Melani McAllister's "One Black Allah: The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African American Liberation, 1955–1970,"60 is integral to her larger study, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U. S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000.61 Interaction among racial/ethnic minorities and constituencies abroad is also being increasingly studied. Marc Gallicchio's African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 is an especially arresting example.62 |
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The history of black radicalism and the black left intersect with these studies, as nationalist sentiment already present in many black communities opened itself to radical perspectives, especially during times of crisis, as in depression and war. Kate A. Baldwin in Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 mounts an ambitious cultural and literary study of the connections between black intellectuals and Soviet culture.63 Penny Von Eschen's study of black radicalism, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957, focuses on the Council on African Affairs and extends from the interwar period to the emergence of independent African states at the end of the colonial period.64 Gerald Horne's "Reflecting Black: Zimbabwe and U.S. Black Nationalism" brings the radical and nationalist nexus up to the era of the wars for national liberation in southern Africa.65 A contribution from Robin D. G. Kelley, "Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter) Nationalism in the Cold War Era," links the Black Power movement to anti-imperialism abroad.66 |
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Work on African Americans has dominated this literature, but increasing attention is being paid to the international dimensions of the experiences of other United States racial/ethnic minorities. Those researching this subject, like Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts, have not always been trained as diplomatic historians.67 One who has been, Lorena Oropeza, has studied the Chicano antiwar movement.68 Political minorities, such as the whites wishing to buck the democratic tide and reassert a white supremacist worldview can be analyzed as "minorities," even as the empires and ideologies sustaining such a stance began to crumble. Thomas Noer's recent essay, "Segregationists and the World: The Foreign Policy of the White Resistance," reviews these efforts, as does Gerald Horne's From the Barrel of a Gun: the United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980, an examination of the anachronistic racism of white Rhodesia and its allies in the United States.69 |
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It has been noted that many current analyses privilege culture in ways that were not customary for diplomatic history in the past. The present conscious adaptations from the field of cultural studies, according to diplomatic historian Emily Rosenberg, dwell on the "variety," "flexibility," and "fluidity" of the ways in which culture is made and "the agency (rather than passivity) of audiences in cultural production."70 Contemporary chroniclers of culture no longer subscribe to the old Marxian idea that culture, imposed from above, is part of the people's "false consciousness." Rather, all participants in society collectively create and negotiate culture. This view of culture as a dynamic process affects the history of foreign relations by removing the distance between officialdom and the societal contexts in which it operates. It exposes the implicit assumptions embedded in policy makers' choices. |
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Globalization, which seems to have as many definitions as people who utter the word, has also made its mark on how we do diplomatic history. An expansive and useful definition is provided by sociologist Malcolm Waters, who views it as "a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements diminish and in which people become aware that they are diminishing."71 For Waters, global economic relationships result from accelerated commerce and investment, labor migration, and intensified levels of international cooperation and coordination. Globalization also profoundly affects politics, because transnational decisions that bypass foreign offices reduce the power and relevance of the nation-state. Such independence has deeply marked culture, as it abets many kinds of international migration (tourists, labor, refugees, technology, capital, information, images, and religious and political ideas and values). Waters' definition emphasizes the interactive aspects of globalization, in which people are highly conscious of the processes of change and actively attempt to mediate it in their own interests. Digital technology has brought the techniques of advertising and persuasion into politics in more compelling ways than ever before conceived. Government officials consequently are much less able to isolate themselves from the public and must learn to wield ideology and culture as instruments of power. New scholarship has begun to explore how policy makers have not only thought deeply about ideological and cultural issues, but have also based major decisions on such considerations. Examples are Krenn, Black Diplomacy; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; and Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era.72 Joseph S. Nye addresses these questions in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power,73 as does Thomas Borstelmann in "Jim Crow's Coming Out: Race Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years."74 |
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Motivated by the rapid changes in daily life as well as in the scholarly professions, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) began a systematic review of U.S. history teaching. The organization evinced a new concern with the dangers of exceptionalism. The OAH issued its La Pietra Report in 2000. The report underscored the need to ground the study of U.S. history in the now undeniable world community and to examine with much more gravity and purpose the perceptions of the United States held abroad. Numerous scholars have subsequently undertaken further consideration of globalization in historical perspective.75 Thomas W. Zeiler, "Just Do It! Globalization for Diplomatic Historians,"76 Thomas J. Osborne, "Implementing the La Pietra Report: Internationalizing Three Topics in the United States History Survey Course;"77 and Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age78 have worked on this issue. |
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The end of the Cold War allowed attention to turn to such neglected areas as modernization in developing nations and how United States policy activists conceived of the progress they hoped to encourage in the Third World. Theories about modernization held by social scientists and politicians, and the practices of the technicians who would carry out their ideas, have had a major impact on United States relations with previously colonized countries. Not the least of current insights is the recognition that modernity does not necessarily follow a linear path from benightedness to enlightenment often suggested in popular thought. In the minds of some citizens of emerging states, it is a declension.79 |
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Modernization has also come under fire from scholars who identify themselves as postmodernists. These critics have been more influential in literary criticism and philosophy than in the social sciences, but their assault on essential, unitary identities, on "meta-narratives," and universalist beliefs about human nature, have had an impact on the discipline of history. In the United States field, they have laid down challenges to standard ways of writing and interpreting ethnic history. As detractors of the nation-state, they have placed the presumptions of conventional scholarship about international relations on the defensive and helped prepare the ground for a shift away from purely bilateral concerns.80 |
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It might come as a surprise to many that traditional diplomatic history—traditional in the sense of preserving a central reliance on the analysis of state papers and focusing on relations between chancelleries and executives—is also absorbing the innovations more often associated with heterodox interests. Access to foreign archives has been equally important for these historians and has contributed to the growing vitality of the field. Two research collectives, the Cold War International History Project and the National Security Archive, have been among the leaders here. These institutes focus on the declassification and dissemination of previously unavailable primary sources, and on the publication of new studies based on these materials. Their work does not generally focus on new methodologies. This pursuit of access has demanded a more exacting account of the past. The work of scholars, such as Piero Gleijeses, author of Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976,81 and Odd Arne Westad, editor of Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963,82 is based on their appreciation of the importance of texts and their rigorous interpretation. They have lent greater precision to a field that, for all of its new attention to society as a whole, must ultimately ground its insights in specific, empirically verifiable events and practices.83 |
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Change is also overtaking the venerable bible of conventional diplomatic studies, the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, published by the Department of State. The FRUS volumes' statutory mandate has always been to be a "thorough, accurate, and reliable record of major United States foreign policy decisions and significant United States diplomatic activity" and is cited in every tome. However, in the last several years, the staff of the State Department Office of the Historian in the Bureau of Public Affairs has taken an enlarged view of this mandate. In recent publications, it has chosen to print documents that go further than ever before in placing United States foreign policy in the context of the intellectual and cultural milieus in which public officials are immersed. An outstanding example is the 2003 compilation, Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1969–1972. The editors describe the volume as "a departure" that "is unique in that it explores the collective mind-set of the Nixon administration on foreign policy issues rather than documenting foreign policy decisions or diplomatic exchange." The focus is on "the intellectual assumptions underlying" the White House approach to world affairs during these years. This topical focus is reiterated in the recent volumes on the Johnson administration, which equally search for explanations of the evolution of United States foreign policy rather than simply log its application.84 |
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The State Department's historical office, with a staff of many recent history Ph.D.s, stays in touch with the profession, and abreast of many of the currents now engaging the field. Past publications, such as the 1999 volume on Energy, Diplomacy, and Global Issues, have been successful attempts to overcome the limits often imposed by the bilateral approach. The compendium in question probes such issues as global poverty, the role of natural resources in international conflicts, population growth, and human rights.85 In sum, we are no longer confronted by a field with a "radical flank" of experimenters, dabbling in innovations provided by trendy sub-fields, and an "old guard" committed to traditional methods. Instead, the field of foreign relations history has become more inclusive. Its vitality and the exciting new scholarship emerging almost daily will provide intellectual sustenance for many years to come. |
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Notes
1. Christian Science Monitor, December 23, 2004, p. 25.
2. Program, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2003 Conference, June 6–8, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; Robert L. Beisner, "Some Notes on the New American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature," SHAFR Newsletter 34 March 2003, on-line at <www.shafr.org/newsletter/2003/mar/guide.htm>.
3. "Globalization after September 11," The Chronicle of Higher Education 48, January 18, 2002, B11.
4. (New York: Knopf, 2002).
5. See also Roger Adelson, "Interview With Michael J. Hogan," Historian 61 (Spring 1999): 502–1.
6. Diplomatic History 20 (Fall 1996): 627–38.
7. American Historical Review 105 (3: 2000): 739–69.
8. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).
9. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
10. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000).
11. (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
12. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1999).
13. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
14. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
15. Robert Griffith, "The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies," Reviews in American History 29 (March 2001): 150–157.
16. Diplomatic History 15 (Winter 1991): 1–11.
17. Richard Pells, "Historians Would Do Well to Get Out of the Country," Chronicle of Higher Education 49, June 20, 2003, B7. See also Robert J. McMahon, "Cultures of Empire," Journal of American History 88 (Dec. 2001): 888–92.
18. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
19. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
20. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
21. Public Culture 7 (1995): 559–92; and American Quarterly 48: 475–90, respectively.
22. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
23. (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
24. (London and New York: Verso, 1993).
25. American Quarterly 50 (3:1998) 471–522.
26. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
27. (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
28. In Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, eds. Pnina Werber and Tariq Modood (London, Zed Press, 1997): 70–89.
29. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pres, 2000).
30. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World eds. Frederick Cooper and Ana Laura Stoler (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997).
31. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
32. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989).
33. (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1994).
34. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998).
35. Brown Journal of World Affairs 10:(Winter/Spring 2004): 35–46.
36. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998): 14–27.
37. Ibid, 54.
38. In Harris and King, eds., Rocking the Ship of State, 35–73.
39. Signs 12 (4:1987: 687–728).
40. 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See also Enloe's Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women's Lives (London: Pluto Press, 1983).
41. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
42. Diplomatic History 18 (Winter 1994)- 59–70.
43. Diplomatic History 23 (Summer 1999): 479–97.
44. Diplomatic History 21 (Spring 1997): 16–80).
45. Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1309–1339.
46. These include Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
47. American Ethnologist 16 (November 1989): 634–60. See also Stoler's Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
48. Jack Stauder, "The 'Relevance' of Anthropology to Colonialism and Imperialism," in Sandra Harding, ed., The "Racial" Economy of Science (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993): 408–427.
49. Ana Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, pp. 263–83.
50. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997). See also Robert A. Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914: A Case Study in British Informal Empire (Rutherford, N. J. and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University and Associated University Presses, 1989); Katherine Harris, African and American Values: Liberia and West Africa (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1985).
51. Pacific Historical Review 59 (4:1990): 527–52.
52. (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
53. 2nd ed. (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1996).
54. (Cambridge, Eng. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
55. Op. cit.; (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
56. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
57. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Mary Dudziak, "Brown as a Cold War Case," Journal of American History 91 (June 2004): 32–42.
58. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
59. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000).
60. American Quarterly 51 (3: 1999): 622–656.
61. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
62. (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
63. (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
64. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
65. In Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed., Eddie Glaude (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002): 91–112.
66. In Is It Nation Time? 67–90.
67. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
68. Lorena Oropeza, "Antiwar Aztlán: The Chicano Movement Opposes U.S. Intervention in Vietnam," in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988, ed., Brenda Gayle Plummer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2003), 201–220.
69. Noer's essay is in Window on Freedom, 141–62. Gerald Horne, From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
70. Emily S. Rosenberg, "'Foreign Affairs After World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics," Diplomatic History 18 (Winter 1994): 69.
71. Malcolm Waters, Globalization (London Routledge, 1995), 3. See also D. Clayton Brown, Globalization and America since 1945 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003); Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000); Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
72. A Diplomatic Revolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); see also Matthew Connelly, "Taking Off the Cold War Lens;" Penny Von Eschen, "Who's the Real Ambassador? Exploding Cold War Racial Ideology," in Cold War Constructions, ed. Appy, 110–131; Elaine Tyler May and Reinhold Wagnleitner, eds. "Here, There and Everywhere": The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 34–63; Joseph A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789–1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Cary Fraser, "An American Dilemma: Race and Realpolitik in the American Response to the Bandung Conference, 1955, in Window on Freedom, 115–140.
73. (New York, 1990).
74. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29 (3:1999): 549–69.
75. The La Pietra Report is available on-line at <http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/>.
76. Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001): 529–51. See also Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
77. History Teacher 36 (Feb 2003): 165–76.
78. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
79. Modernization theory and practice has taken a beating from numerous critics across diverse topics. Some examples are Homa Hoodfar, "The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: Veiling Practices and Muslim Women," pp. 248–279, in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, eds. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Stoler and Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony;" Connelly, "Taking Off the Cold War Lens;" Dennis Merrill, "Negotiating Cold War Paradise: U.S. Tourism, Economic Planning, and Cultural Modernity in Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico," Diplomatic History 25:2 (Spring 2001): 179–214; Christopher T. Fisher. "'The Hopes of Man': The Cold War, Modernization Theory, and the Issue of Race in the 1960s," Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2002.
80. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Friedman, "Global Crises," in Debating Cultural Hybridity, eds. Werber and Modood; Louis F. Mirón, "Postmodernism and the Politics of Racialized Identities," in Rodolfo D. Torres, Louis F. Mirón, and Jonathan Javier Inda, eds., Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader (Malden, Mass., Blackwell, 1999), 79–100; Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
81. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
82. (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 1998).
83. The Cold War International History Project website is at <http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.home> and the National Security Archive at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/> respectively maintain detailed web sites that feature declassification news, primary documents and many of the studies they have published. See also the work of individual historians, such as Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 1998).
84. U. S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1969–1972 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 2003). See for example, U. S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Organization and Management of U.S. Foreign Policy; United Nations, Vol. XXXIII (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 2004).
85. U. S. Department of State Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXXIV: Energy, Diplomacy, and Global Issues 1972 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1999).
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