michael j.

hogan*

SHAFR Presidential Address:

The “Next Big Thing”:
The Future of Diplomatic History in a Global Age

It seems fitting to begin this address with a reference to Charles Maier, whose
famous critique of our field, published twenty-three years ago, ushered in an
era of critical introspection and self-flagellation among diplomatic historians.
Whether intended or not, one of Maier’s more recent essays actually hints at
the dawning of a new day, when diplomatic history might well return from the
margin to the mainstream of historical studies. In “Consigning the Twentieth
Century to History,” published in June 2000, Maier argues that the age of
“territoriality,” an age of “bounded geographical space” marked by a “frontier
at the edge and the lands within,” was coming to an end. Between 1870 and
1970, bounded space had provided the “basis for material resources, political
power, and common allegiance,” for “identity space” and “decision space,” for
state sovereignty, and for the great geopolitical struggles inscribed in the annals
of diplomatic history. According to Maier, however, the era of territoriality had
started to wane after 1970, coincident, I might add, with the waning of diplo-
matic history. In the new global age, information and technology, rather than
territory, constitute the basis of economic and political power; allegiance to the
state gives way to new forms of identity, and bounded space gives way to “culture
or civilization” as the source of global conflict.1
If the decline of territoriality coincided with the decline of diplomatic
history, specialists in the field might still take heart, or so Maier seemed to imply.
After all, there was good work to be done exploring the unfolding process of
globalization and the new identities and sources of conflict it created. Lynn
Hunt, then president of the American Historical Association, made a similar
point two years later, when she, too, seemed to predict a revival of diplomatic
history. It had been a long time since such an eminence had nodded approv-

*Ohio State University

1. Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narra-
tives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105 (June 2000): 807–31. The quota-
tions are from pages 816, 829. For Maier’s famous critique of diplomatic history, see his essay
“Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,” in The Past Before Us:
Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, NY, 1980),
355–87. The idea that old geopolitical struggles are giving way to civilizational clashes has
been popularized in Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York, 1996).

Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 1 ( January 2004). © 2004 The Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

1
2 : diplomatic history

ingly in our direction, yet there it was. Writing against a backdrop that included
the decline of theory in historical studies and a rising concern with issues of
globalization, Hunt noted how current events were forcing historians to ask new
questions of the past and explore new approaches. It was in this context that
she wondered if the “next big thing” would be “some kind of revival or refash-
ioning of diplomatic” history.2
Actually, that refashioning has been going on for several years. As anyone
familiar with the pages of Diplomatic History will know, the last decade or so has
witnessed a growing number of scholarly articles dealing not only with new
topics, such as those having to do with race or gender, but also with new the-
oretical approaches, notably those borrowed from cultural studies. On gender,
for example, one thinks of Frank Costigliola’s important essays, or Kristin L.
Hoganson’s work on the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars,
or Robert Dean’s new book on gender and the Cold War, to name but a few.3
On race we can point to contributions by Brenda Gayle Plummer, Penny
von Eschen, Michael Krenn, Marc Gallicchio, Thomas Borstelmann, Gerald
Horne, James Meriwether, and Carol Anderson.4 And when it comes to the
“cultural turn,” we think first and foremost of Emily S. Rosenberg. One of the
most imaginative diplomatic historians of her generation, Emily’s brilliant work
helped to clear a path for a batch of new books that borrowed from cultural
studies, including Andrew S. Rotter’s book on the United States and India, Mark
Bradley’s on Vietnam, Mary Renda’s on Haiti, and Matthew Connelly’s on
Algeria, not to mention the books by Hoganson and Dean cited earlier.5

2. Lynn Hunt, “Where Have All the Theories Gone?” Perspectives 40 (March 2002): 5–7.
The quotation is from page 7.
3. See, for example, Frank Costigliola, “ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender,
Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of Ameri-
can History 83 (March 1997): 1309–39; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood:
How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven,
CT, 1998); and Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign
Policy (Amherst, MA, 2001). Needless to say, there are many other excellent books and arti-
cles that might be cited, but in this note, as in others, my intention is to be illustrative, not
definitive.
4. Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa
in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans
and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Penny M. von Eschen, Race
against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Michael
Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–1969 (Armonk, NY,
1999); Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Interna-
tionalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Gerald Horne, From the Barrel of a
Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill, NC 2001);
Thomas Borstlemann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global
Arena (Cambridge, MA, 2001); James H. Meriweather, Proundly We Can Be Africans: Black
Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); and Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the
Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New
York, 2003).
5. Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar
Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United
States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, NY, 2000); Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and
 The “Next Big Thing” : 3

To be sure, more traditional approaches still dominate the field and the
journal, but they increasingly share space with works, often by younger schol-
ars, that are asking new questions and exploring new sources. The same diver-
sity of paradigms, old and new, has led Tom Paterson and me to revise our joint
venture, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. In addition to essays
on more established paradigms, the new volume contains chapters on cultural
transfer by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, on modernization theory by Nick Cul-
lather, on comparative history and the global frontier by Nathan J. Citino, on
memory and foreign relations by Robert D. Schulzinger, on gender by Kristin
Hoganson, on race and ethnicity by Gerald Horne, and on critical theory by
Frank Costigliola. The new edition thus reflects more fully than its predeces-
sor the intellectual pluralism that now marks a discipline that not long ago was
seen as a wasteland by historians in other fields.6
Although diplomatic historians can take pride in these developments, they
do not completely capture what may be the most significant trend in recent
scholarship—a trend that could put our field at the very heart of (post)modern
historical studies. Suggested by the idea of “globalization,” which both Maier
and Hunt invoke, this is the trend toward internationalizing the study of
American history and culture. The signs of this trend are everywhere. Several
years ago the Organization of American Historians established an International
Committee, which I chaired for a while and which tried to promote exchange
arrangements with universities in other countries, recognize the best work on
American history by foreign scholars, bring these scholars to the OAH’s annual
meeting, and internationalize the organization’s publication, the Journal of
American History. For its part, the Journal of American History created an inter-
national board of contributing editors, published more work on American
history written by scholars outside the United States, and launched a concerted
effort to review books by similar scholars. Perhaps most importantly, the Orga-
nization of American Historians collaborated with New York University to
establish the Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History. Work
on this project went forward at a series of meetings convened under the lead-
ership of Professor Thomas Bender of New York University and held at NYU’s
Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy. At these meetings, historians from the United
States and elsewhere brought a variety of specializations to bear on ways to

America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Mary A.
Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel
Hill, NC, 2001); and Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Indepen-
dence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (NewYork, 2002). See also Christian G. Appy,
ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966
(Amherst, MA, 2000), and John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the
Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). For a brief survey of recent work dealing
with the cultural aspects of American foreign relations, see Robert Griffith, “The Cultural
Turn in Cold War Studies,” Reviews in American History 29 (2001): 15–57.
6. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign
Relations, rev. ed. (New York, 2004).
4 : diplomatic history

create a new international framework for American history.7 Participants

exchanged scholarly papers exploring new frameworks, and Bender subse-
quently published a selection of these papers in Rethinking American History in
a Global Age, a book I strongly recommend.8
According to Bender and his colleagues, “the inherited framing of American
national history” did not link the nation to “transnational and global develop-
ments.” They urged a reconsideration of the past “from a perspective less tightly
bound to perceptions of the nation as the container of American history” and
more closely informed by “a new awareness of subnational, transnational,
and global political, economic, social, and cultural processes.”9 In short, Bender
and his collaborators wanted to “contextualize the United States on a global
scale,” knowing full well that a global context would dull “the lingering notes
of American exceptionalism.”10 Some, notably Ian Tyrrell, recommended a com-
parative approach, particularly one that counterposed the American experience
with that of countries outside of Europe.11 Others, such as Rob Kroes, sought
to explore the way America’s presence in the world, or even the notion of
America as an imaginary entity, has been received, experienced, and recontex-
tualized internationally.12 Still others, such as Charles Bright and Michael
Geyer, wanted to focus on questions of sovereignty, including American sover-
eignty, and how it is negotiated and delineated in an international setting.13 And
still others wanted to obliterate “the very context of the nation-state as the
central structuring element in historical narratives.”14
However they divided, these and other historians agreed with the final report
of the La Pietra meetings, published in 2000. Issued by Bender on behalf of the
Organization of American Historians, the La Pietra Report concluded that glob-
alization required nothing less than a basic reconceptualization of American
history, to be accomplished by situating the United States in a larger, transna-
tional or international context. Pointing to recent work dealing with interna-

7. David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Interna-
tionalization of American History,” Journal of American History 79 (September 1992): 432–62;
and Thomas Bender, La Pietra Report: Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History
(Bloomington, IN, 2000).
8. Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA, 2002).
9. Bender, “Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plentitude of Narratives,” in
Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age, 1–21. The quoted material is from p.
3.
10. The first quotation is from La Pietra Report, 6. The second is from Charles Bright and
Michael Geyer, “Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the
Global Age,” in Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age, 64.
11. Ian Tyrrell, “Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies,
and the Internationalization of American History,” in ibid., 168–91.
12. Rob Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving
End,” in ibid., 295–313.
13. Bright and Geyer, “Where in the World Is America?” in ibid., 63–99.
14. The quotation is from Rob Kroes, who is referring to David Thelen, then editor of
the Journal of American History. See Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism,” in
ibid., 296.
 The “Next Big Thing” : 5

tional migrations, social movements, and environmental issues, and with topics
such as the African diaspora and the creation of the Atlantic world, the report
imagined a history that no longer dealt with the national project alone but
with transnational processes that could be larger or smaller than the nation. To
prepare a new generation of historians for this task, Bender and his collabora-
tors proposed a vast revision of the curriculum in history departments at
American universities and changes in the way we professionalize graduate stu-
dents and young faculty, including, of course, more language training and more
international research and teaching experience.15
Nor was the Organization of American Historians the only professional
society that began to internationalize in the 1990s. In some ways the most
dramatic transformation occurred in the field of American studies. As Janice
Radway, Werner Sollars, Robert Gross, and many others have noted, no other
interdisciplinary endeavor was more radically remade in the last two decades
than the field of American studies. In its Cold War presentation, American
studies focused on aspects of American life that were supposedly unique and
unifying. This brand of scholarship, which I studied in graduate school, talked
about the American experience, the American frontier, the American mind,
and the American Adam. It imagined America as a virgin land, a New World
unsoiled by the corrupt traditions and debilitating divisions of the Old.
Celebrating American exceptionalism, it ignored differences and was implicitly
nationalistic, even chauvinistic, in its view of American values and institutions
as models for the world.16
Popular in the 1950s and 1960s, this older approach broke down under the
weight of multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s, not to mention the enor-
mous impact of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, both of which
stimulated an interest in global questions among specialists in American studies.
Suddenly, as these specialists began to explore issues of race, class, and gender,
as well as sexual orientation and regional and religious differences, it was no
longer possible to assume a single, unified American identity. As Robert Gross
pointed out, “even to speak of ‘America’ ” became an “aggressive act,” in part
because it effaced the way residents of the nation divided from one another, in

15. La Pietra Report, especially 10–18.

16. Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Asso-
ciation, 20 November 1998,” American Quarterly 51 (March 1999): 1–31; Werner Sollors, “The
Internationalization of American Studies: Notes on the Founding of the IASA,” American
Studies International 38 (October 2000): 107–114; and Robert A. Gross, “The Transnational
Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World,” Journal of American Studies 34
(December 2000): 373–93. See also Paul Giles, “Reconstructing American Studies: Transna-
tional Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives,” Journal of American Studies 28 (December 1994):
335–58; Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez, “Resituating American Studies in a
Critical Internationalism,” American Quarterly 48 (September 1996): 475–90; Paul Giles,
“Virtual Americas: The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of
Exchange,” American Quarterly 50 (September 1998): 523–47; and John Carlos Rowe, “Post-
Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies,” Cultural Critique 40 (fall 1998):
11–28.
6 : diplomatic history

part because it appropriated for the United States a term that others in the
Western Hemisphere claimed for themselves. Multiculturalism debunked the
notion of American exceptionalism, of a uniquely American experience, just as
postcolonial and subaltern studies fostered a new concern with the history of
Western imperialism and with the connection between knowledge and power
in the modern world. Taken together, these developments set the stage for what
Gross called “the transnational turn” in American studies.17
Like Thomas Bender, David Thelen, and other American historians, Gross
and his colleagues in the field of American studies wanted to situate their
subject in a “wider world.”18 Indeed, “internationalization,” “globalization,” and
“transnationalism” became the new watchwords of American studies in the
1990s—a period that was clearly one of the most fertile in the history of that
interdisciplinary endeavor. The decade saw important intellectual and organi-
zational transformations, beginning with the publication in 1993 of Amy Kaplan
and Donald Pease’s influential volume, Cultures of United States Imperialism, and
followed in November 1998 by the annual meeting of the American Studies
Association in Seattle. Wrapped around the theme “American Studies and the
Question of Empire,” the convention featured a major address by Janice Radway
and at least forty individual sessions that borrowed heavily from the new inter-
est in subaltern and postcolonial studies and that began to internationalize the
multicultural themes of the previous decade.19
The Seattle convention set the tone for subsequent meetings of the Ameri-
can Studies Association, which took as their themes “Crossing Borders/
Crossing Centuries,” “American Studies in the World/The World in American
Studies,” and “The Local and the Global.” At the same time, American Quar-
terly, the official journal of the American Studies Association, brought out a
special issue of articles that dealt with a variety of transnational and inter-
national topics. That issue was one of a dozen new works by specialists in
American studies who were beginning to explore themes and topics similar to
their counterparts among American historians, including the black Atlantic,
travel narratives, and migration.20
As with the Organization of American Historians, new forms of scholarship
led to calls for organizational change in the American Studies Association and
for a new professional agenda. Indeed, the Organization of American Histori-

17. Gross, “The Transnational Turn,” 377. Postcolonial theory and subaltern studies are
discussed briefly later in this essay.
18. The term is borrowed from the title of Gross’s article cited in the previous note.
19. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham,
NC, 1993); Radway, “What’s in a Name?” 1; and Gross, “The Transnational Turn,” 377–78.
20. Gross, “The Transnational Turn,” 377; American Quarterly, 50 (September 1998),
471–608; and American Studies Association Annual Meetings, 1996–2001, retrieved 3 July
2002 from http://www.press.jhu.edu/associations/asa/conventions.html. The special issue of
American Quarterly in 1998 was followed by a special issue on “Globalization, Transnational-
ism, and the End of the American Century,” published in American Studies 41 (summer/fall
2000).
 The “Next Big Thing” : 7

ans and the American Studies Association collaborated briefly on a newsletter

that linked American specialists abroad with their counterparts in the United
States. Annual meetings of the American Studies Association inspired one
presidential address after another on the subject of internationalization, not to
mention dozens of panels featuring foreign scholars or papers that cast their
subjects in a comparative, transnational, or international frame. Scholars like
Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez urged an internationalizing
agenda for the American Studies Association similar to the one that Thomas
Bender and his colleagues drafted at Villa La Pietra. Indeed, leaders from the
American Studies Association convened their own version of the La Pietra con-
ference, this one at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Conference and Study Center
in Bellagio, Italy. The meeting brought together twenty-two participants
from a dozen different countries. Organizing the new International American
Studies Association to advance their goals, the group celebrated the intellectual
benefits of greater collaboration and called for more language learning,
scholarly exchanges, and other steps to situate the field of American studies
internationally.21
The American Studies Association had counterparts around the world, such
as the European American Studies Association, the Japanese Association for
American Studies, the Czech and Slovak American Studies Association, the
American Studies Association of Turkey, and the Italian Association of North
American Studies, to name just a few. Representatives from these and other
national associations participated in the Bellagio conference and the founding
of the International American Studies Association, so that the drive to interna-
tionalize the field was itself a global phenomenon.22
Not surprisingly, the new association moved quickly to sponsor its “First
World Congress,” which met in The Netherlands in May 2003 to address the
topic “How Far Is America from Here?” The topic was in line with the declared
mission of the association, which aimed to further the international exchange
of ideas among scholars who “study and teach America regionally, hemispher-
ically, nationally, transnationally, and as a global phenomenon.” Within this
framework, the program committee invited papers dealing with America’s
role in the process of globalization and with such global issues as geographical
exploration, environmental crises, the discourse on terrorism, the relationship
between America and the Caribbean, global capital flows, and the political and
cultural implications of free trade. It specifically welcomed proposals from
scholars working with a variety of methodological approaches and in a variety
of fields, including history, anthropology, and the social sciences, as well as lit-
erature, culture, and the media. Indeed, the committee clearly sought to craft
a program that reflected “the diversity of scholarly interests” in the field, just

21. Desmond and Domínguez, “Resituating American Studies in a Critical International-

ism,” 479–80, 486–87; and Sollors, “The Internationalization of American Studies,” 108–14.
22. Sollors, “The Internationalization of American Studies,” 109–112.
8 : diplomatic history

as the International American Studies Association wanted to promote a “truly

emancipatory plurality of openness and multivalence.”23
Developments in the American Studies Association and the Organization of
American History were similar to those also evident in the American Histori-
cal Association, where scholars, mostly non-Americanists, launched the new
field of world history. In this case, too, the scholars involved began to cast their
national specializations in a global perspective, eventually forming both their
own organization and their own journal. Emerging in part because of concerns
with overspecialization, with flagging enrollments in history classes at the
college level, and with bad teaching in the public schools, the founding of
the World History Association in the 1980s also reflected a new concern with
the growing irrelevance of a strictly Eurocentric focus in an increasingly global
age. There was a need, as Michael Geyer and Charles Bright explained, to
narrate the history of global integration, to explain how the modern world had
been shaped by the globalizing tendencies of the past, and to get at these ten-
dencies not only through the comparative study of civilizations and empires but
also through new histories “of mobility and mobilization, of trade and mer-
chants, of migrants and diasporas, of travelers and communication.” By 1995,
the new field of world history had become “one of the fastest growing areas of
teaching.” It had begun to produce its own “body of scholarly writing” and had
its own very successful journal, the Journal of World History.24
What does all this mean for those of us who specialize in the history of Amer-
ican foreign relations? To start with the good news, it means that other histo-
rians are turning our way. For several years now, leading diplomatic historians
have worried about the isolation of our field from the main currents of histor-
ical scholarship and about how we might recapture a leadership role for our-
selves. Now it appears that other historians, quite on their own, have come to
see the importance of international relations and an international perspective
on their own inquiries. The bad news is that we have not done enough to hitch
ourselves to this rising star. To a large extent, the internationalization of
American history is happening without a substantial contribution from those
who actually specialize in American international history.25

23. “CFP: ‘How Far Is America From Here?’, IASA,” 30 April 2002, message posted to
h-amstdy electronic mailing list (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~amstdy). See also Sollors, “The
Internationalization of American Studies,” 109–112.
24. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American His-
torical Review 100 (October 1995): 1034–60. The quotations are from 1039, 1037. See also
Gilbert Allardyce, “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World
History Course,” Journal of World History 1 (spring 1990): 23–76; T. E. Vadney, “World History
as an Advanced Academic Field,” Journal of World History 1 (fall 1990): 209–23; Philip D.
Curtin, “Graduate Teaching in World History,” Journal of World History 2 (spring 1991): 81–89;
and Jerry H. Bentley, Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, DC,
1996).
25. Michael Kammen, “Clio, Columbia, and the Cosmopolitans: Beyond American Excep-
tionalism and the Nation-State,” History and Theory 42 (February 2003): 110.
 The “Next Big Thing” : 9

A few examples will illustrate my point, beginning with the sources cited by
the authors listed in my footnotes thus far. Even a quick glance will confirm
that few of these authors reference works by even the most distinguished
members of our society. Much the same would be true if you read the articles
on global, transnational, and international subjects published in the September
1998 issue of American Quarterly, or, I suspect, if you leafed through the many
papers on similar subjects presented at the annual meetings of the American
Studies Association since 1998. In few if any cases are these authors, or their
papers, articles, and books, informed by the work being done by diplomatic
historians.26
Look also at the seventy-eight historians who participated in the La Pietra
meetings between 1997 and 2000, and you will find only a handful who might
be considered specialists in the history of American foreign relations.27 Look at
Bender’s volume Rethinking American History in a Global Age and you will find
only two chapters by scholars of American foreign relations.28 Or look more
recently at the 150 historians featured in the Organization of American Histo-
rians Distinguished Lectureship Program for 2002–2003. Of the sixteen schol-
ars included under the heading “International” in the index to this program,
only one, Akira Iriye, is a specialist in the history of American foreign relations.
Even more interesting, the program lists a number of lecture topics on inter-
national subjects by scholars who are not SHAFR members or specialists in our
field, such as “Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the
Early Modern Era,” by Jack P. Greene of Johns Hopkins University, or “War
of Dreams: Indians, Whites, and the Struggle for the Great Plains,” by Elliott
West of the University of Arkansas.29
Something similar might be said of the scholarly articles on international
subjects appearing in major journals, excluding Diplomatic History. It would not
be fair to say that these journals have lost interest in such subjects, a complaint
frequently heard among diplomatic historians. On the contrary, the Journal of
American History and American Quarterly, to name just two, have made a con-
certed effort to internationalize over the last decade. Nevertheless, traditional
diplomatic history has not figured prominently in this effort, nor even diplo-

26. The exception would be an occasional reference to work by Emily Rosenberg, for
example, or by Akira Iriye, or to the recent scholarship on Americanization abroad.
27. The participants in the La Pietra meetings are listed in the La Pietra Report, 22–23.
Those who would be easily recognized as historians of American foreign relations include
Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Lester D. Langley, and Marilyn Young. There were others, like
Kristin Hoganson and Yukiko Koshiro, who might be considered students of U.S. diplomatic
history but who were trained by specialists outside the field. No doubt others, myself included,
were invited to Villa La Pietra but could not attend.
28. The chapters are by Akira Iriye, “Internationalizing International History,” and
Marilyn B. Young, “The Age of Global Power,” in Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in
a Global Age, 47–62, 274–94.
29. OAH, Newsletter, May 2002, A1–A12. Curiously, Robert Divine is on the list but not
included under the index heading “International.”
10 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

matic historians. Between 1991 and 2002, the Journal of American History
published only one article that might be categorized as traditional diplomatic
history. All other articles on international subjects tended to push the discipline
in the direction of social and cultural history or were written by foreign schol-
ars or by scholars who came to international history through their interest in
American studies and other fields.30 During the same period, moreover, the
Journal of American History featured roundtables and special issues dealing with
international and transnational topics, all of which featured contributors who
came, with one exception, from disciplines other than diplomatic history.31
The same point can be made about American Quarterly, the journal of the
American Studies Association, whose members, as noted earlier, have been
aggressively internationalizing their discipline for more than a decade. Not
surprisingly, the emphasis in this journal is on articles that explore cultural
and multicultural approaches to international subjects, such as Ruth Vasey’s
“Foreign Parts: Hollywood’s Global Distribution and the Representation of
Ethnicity,” or Caren Irr’s “Queer Borders: Figures from the 1930s for U.S.-
Canadian Relations,” or Nikhil Pal Singh’s “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire
in an Age of Democracy.”32 What is surprising is the virtual absence of schol-
arship by diplomatic historians working on the cultural and social aspects of

30. The categorization here is somewhat arbitrary and the word “traditional,” I realize,
may appear to some as a pejorative. That said, the more traditional piece I have in mind is the
article by Fred I. Greenstein and Richard H. Immerman, “What Did Eisenhower Tell Kennedy
about Indochina? The Politics of Misperception,” Journal of American History 79 (September
1992): 568–87. Another article, by Margaret Beattie Bogue, which may appear as somewhat
traditional, given that it deals in part with government-to-government relations, is in fact an
innovative effort to merge environmental and diplomatic history. See Bogue, “To Save the
Fish: Canada, the United States, the Great Lakes, and the Joint Commission of 1892,” Journal
of American History 79 (March 1993): 1429–54. For articles that push international history in
the direction of social and cultural history, see, for example, Andrew J. Rotter, “Gender Rela-
tions, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964,” Journal of American
History 81 (September 1994): 518–42; and Eileen P. Scully, “Taking the Low Road to
Sino-American Relations: ‘Open Door’ Expansionists and the Two China Markets,” Journal of
American History 82 (June 1995): 62–83. For an example of American international history by
a foreign scholar, see Mario Del Pero, “The United States and ‘Psychological Warfare’ in Italy,
1948–1955,” Journal of American History 87 (March 2001): 1304–34. For a work by a scholar
who came to diplomatic history through another field, see Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker,
Racial Protest, and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 81 (September 1994): 543–70.
Needless to say, these citations are illustrative only.
31. See the special issues, “Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the
United States as a Case Study,” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999): 439–697, and
“The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of
American History 86 (December 1999): 965–1307; and the roundtable “Empires and Intima-
cies: Lessons from (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001):
829–97. The last roundtable contains a critique: Robert J. McMahon, “Cultures of Empire,”
Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 888–92.
32. Ruth Vasey, “Foreign Parts: Hollywood’s Global Distribution and the Representation
of Ethnicity,” American Quarterly 44 (December 1992): 617–42; Caren Irr, “Queer Borders:
Figures from the 1930s for U.S.-Canadian Relations,” American Quarterly 49 (September
1997): 504–30; and Nikhil Pal Singh, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democ-
racy,” ibid. 50 (September 1998): 471–522.
 The “Next Big Thing” : 11

international relations. Diplomatic historians might turn to the Journal of Amer-

ican History, at least occasionally, but not yet to American Quarterly, despite its
growing interest in international subjects and the vision, proclaimed by the
International American Studies Association, of a more inclusive disciple, open
to scholarship from all fields.
If diplomatic historians do not see American Quarterly, or even the Journal
of American History, as an outlet for their scholarship, something similar might
be said of the way specialists in other fields view Diplomatic History. Although
Diplomatic History has done a much better job of opening its pages to scholars
who are taking the cultural turn, these are invariably diplomatic historians who
have adapted approaches pioneered by their counterparts in other fields. It is
still the case that few internationalists trained in other disciplines see our journal
as an outlet for their work. This is clearly the case with internationalists who
have been trained in other fields of history and who invariably look to the Amer-
ican Historical Review, the Journal of American History, and the Journal of World
History, among others, as outlets for their work. It is also the case with special-
ists in American studies. Indeed, it is amazing how much of their international
scholarship escapes into journals not usually read by diplomatic historians, such
as boundary 2, Cultural Critique, American Studies, American Literature, and
American Literary History.
Sadly, much the same can be said of the work being done by specialists in
postcolonial and subaltern studies. Although much of this work deals with the
history of U.S. foreign relations, broadly defined, it is more likely to appear in
the journals listed above than in the pages of Diplomatic History. In fact, with
very few exceptions, Matthew Connelly being the most notable, scholars who
have been formally trained in our field are not writing this work. It is being
written instead by anthropologists, or by historians of Latin America and Asia,
or by specialists in cultural studies. Take, for example, David Hanlon’s book,
Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific Territory; or Eileen
J. Suárez Findlay’s book, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race
in Puerto Rico; or Vincente L. Rafael’s book, White Love and Other Events in
Filipino History; or Daniel Nugent’s edited volume, Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S.
Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics.33 None of these innovative works
is by a U.S. diplomatic historian. Hanlon is an ethnohistorian specializing in
Pacific islands history. Findlay is a Latin Americanist. Rafael is a professor of
communications specializing in cultural studies, and the authors in Nugent’s
edited volume are Latin American historians and anthropologists. Looking at
these and other works, including a large number of articles on similar subjects

33. David Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific Territory,
1944–1982 (Honolulu, HI, 1998); Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sex-
uality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1970–1920 (Durham, NC, 1999); Vincente L. Rafael, White Love
and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC, 2000); and Daniel Nugent, ed., Rural Revolt
in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics (Durham, NC, 2000). I am grate-
ful to my graduate student, Yuji Tosaka, for calling these works to my attention.
12 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

published in a variety of journals, one can make the case that U.S. diplomatic
historians are literally losing control of their field to specialists in other disci-
plines; or, to put it differently, that specialists in these other fields are appro-
priating the history of U.S. foreign relations and winning praise for their
interdisciplinary approach, while traditional diplomatic historians are losing
ground, and relevance, in the academic community.
Despite its diversification, Diplomatic History continues to publish far more
scholarship on traditional topics than articles that take a cultural turn toward
international relations. What is more, this is also the case with other journals
in the same field. Indeed, the competition for good articles of this sort is bound
to make it increasingly difficult to sustain the journal’s quality. When I became
the editor of Diplomatic History seventeen years ago, the International History
Review was one of the few journals with a similar specialization. Today, Diplo-
matic History also competes for submissions with Diplomacy and Statecraft, Cold
War History, and the Journal of Cold War Studies, the last two of which, like Diplo-
matic History, for all intents and purposes, specialize in the period after World
War II. Diplomacy and Statecraft, as its title suggests, concentrates on traditional,
state-centered works, as does Cold War History. Since its founding in August
2000, Cold War History has published many articles on U.S. Cold War policy,
only a few of which could be described as following a cultural or international
approach. The same can be said of the Journal of Cold War Studies. With the
exception of a special issue, this journal, too, has published largely traditional
works. Indeed, only International History Review, like Diplomatic History, has tried
to mix its largely traditional scholarship with some of the newer approaches,
though Diplomatic History, I am sorry to say, has been much less successful than
the other journals when it comes to attracting works by historians outside the
United States or to publishing an international menu of scholarly articles.
As this suggests, our discipline still remains too tightly compartmentalized
and too isolated from the main currents of postmodern scholarship. More needs
to be done to break down the disciplinary boundaries that separate diplomatic
history from other fields of inquiry, particularly those that are showing new
interest in international affairs. My plea is to be as open and as inclusive as pos-
sible, to further diversify our journal, and to make it truly a journal of record
that competes not only for the best work on traditional subjects but also for
new work by scholars who have not been trained in the history of American
foreign relations but who are nonetheless contributing to the internationaliza-
tion of American history. This recommendation brings me to the next part of
my presidential address, a set of additional prescriptions gleaned from working
in our field for many years, including fifteen years as the editor of our journal,
a unique experience that gives me a perspective that I hope is as broad as any
other.
Before offering these prescriptions, however, some simple declarations are
in order. It is not my intention to disparage the work of any of my SHAFR col-
leagues, particularly those who write what might be called a more conventional
 The “Next Big Thing” : 13

or traditional diplomatic history. I have done my share of disparaging in the

past; I’m not proud of it these days, and I like to think I’ve finally outgrown it.
Besides, such a course would have the pot calling the kettle black. My own early
work, which introduced the corporatist paradigm to diplomatic history, now
seems conventional when compared to the cultural turn of recent years. And
though my last book, on Truman and the origins of the national security state,
borrowed substantially from theoretical and historical work on ideology, polit-
ical culture, and discourse analysis, it focused on American statemaking in the
early Cold War and is not fully in line with the de-centered and comparative
approaches evident in much of the new cultural and international history.
What is more, I still believe that traditional diplomatic history, with its
emphasis on state-to-state relations and on issues of strategy and geopolitics,
remains a valuable form of scholarship, written as well today as it has ever been
and still a subject of vast popular interest. Nor am I willing to repudiate the
study of American history altogether, or even the study of American foreign
relations as an aspect of the nation’s past. One of the great themes in the history
of our field involves the search for the internal sources of American foreign rela-
tions, an approach that typified the work of many great historians, notably
William Appleman Williams, whose scholarship constitutes perhaps the most
creative contribution to our field in the last century and the only contribution
to frame a grand, master narrative for American diplomatic history. So the plea
here is not to abandon the study of American history, specifically the history of
American foreign relations. The plea is that we collaborate with those who seek
to internationalize that history and take other steps to ensure the survival of our
field as an academic discipline in history departments, as well as political science
departments.
How might we move in that direction? To begin with, we should encourage
colleagues who are trying to de-center the study of foreign relations by looking
beyond the nation, in our case the American nation. My point is exactly the
point made by Akira Iriye. One of only two diplomatic historians with a chapter
in Bender’s Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Iriye used his space
to make the case for “Internationalizing International History.”34 Following
his lead, we should build on the long tradition of international history and
multiarchival research among diplomatic historians, from Samuel Flagg Bemis
through the great historians of our time, such as Ernest May, Michael Hunt,
and many others, including scholars like Christopher Thorne, whose interna-
tional and multiarchival perspective was limited to the British Empire and
largely to English-language sources. Building on this tradition, we might try
harder to look at our subjects internationally, particularly those grounded in
traditional geopolitics, because doing so will help us to contextualize American
power and escape the exceptionalist paradigm, which sees U.S. imperialism as

34. Iriye, “Internationalizing International History,” in Bender, ed., Rethinking American

History in a Global Age, 47–62.
14 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

part of a strictly national narrative. This can be done in some cases by writing
comparatively, as I might have done by comparing the formation of the national
security state in this country with state making in Europe and the Soviet Union
during the early Cold War. It can be done in other cases by situating the
American aspects of a subject in a global context, and in still others cases by
denationalizing the subject altogether and treating it instead as an international
rather than an American phenomenon.
Although it may sound strange coming from a historian of the American
state, we should also encourage colleagues who are looking not only beyond the
nation but also beyond the state, and not just to those organized interest groups
that influence the formation of state policy. If we are truly historians of foreign
relations, not just diplomacy, then the global crusade for human rights, the
international women’s movement, religious movements, and ethnic conflicts, to
name just a few, must become the subjects of our inquiry, quite apart from any
connection to government policy. Iriye’s work on NGOs points in this direc-
tion, as does recent work by a handful of SHAFR colleagues, but much more
remains to be done. As Iriye has pointed out, the history of international rela-
tions need not be the history of government relations, or even the history of
individuals and organizations acting on behalf of their governments or in the
context of government policy. International migrations, environmental trans-
formations, capital movements, culture and technology transfers—these and
other global phenomena may influence government policies but may also exist
as international forces outside the framework of those policies, including the
strategic and geopolitical policies that often preoccupy diplomatic historians.
These transnational forces and their human elements are the stuff of a new
international history and should not escape our attention, or the attention of
our journal.35
In taking this turn, there will be much to learn from scholars in subaltern
and postcolonial studies and from those who are now exploring the history of
borderlands—the same scholars who are transforming the field of American
studies. Emerging from the work of Indian historians in the 1980s, subaltern
scholars rejected the approach of conventional historiography, which privileged
the narrow sphere of elite politics and discounted the role of subordinate
groups. They sought instead to recover the lost voices and silent histories of
oppressed minorities, to give them a new degree of agency and autonomy, and
to chronicle their resistance to colonial domination and the postcolonial rule of
governing elites. Since the 1980s, the insights of subaltern studies have been
used by other scholars to write a new history of imperialism, capitalism, and
modernity, and to reveal the history of marginalized groups, including women,
peasants, and ethnic and racial groups, in various parts of the world. They have
also become important elements in the field of postcolonial studies, evident in

35. Ibid. See Iriye’s footnotes for new international histories by scholars in a variety of
fields, including diplomatic history.
 The “Next Big Thing” : 15

the work of Edward Said and others. This work seeks to deconstruct the prac-
tice and legacy of Western colonialism, in part by revealing the way Western
knowledge and identities have been constructed through imperial links to colo-
nialism, racism, and the non-Western “other,” in part by exploring the way non-
Western culture has been constructed from the residual effects of colonialism,
creating, in effect, a postcolonial hybrid occupying a space between two cul-
tures. In either case, postcolonial theory tends to focus on the connection
between knowledge and power and on the way cultural differences are captured
in binary definitions of the other and us.36
Concerned with issues of representation and identity in an imperial rela-
tionship, postcolonial scholars, as Emily Rosenberg has noted, seek “to explore
the cultural borders that empire-building both induced and undermined.”37
Together with the new Western historians, and historians of the colonial and
early national experience, they have contributed to a new history of frontiers,
which sees these borderlands as zones between different societies, as regions of
cross-cultural mixing and social fluidity, as contested spaces where authority was
undefined and personal identities were culturally constructed and individually
negotiated. Sites of cultural conflict, borderlands could also be sites of tradi-
tional diplomacy, and not only the diplomacy, much ignored by our field,
between indigenous people and imperial powers. Because borderlands were
bounded by competing sovereignties, they could also be zones of political, eco-
nomic, and military rivalry between states that were seeking to solidify their
control, integrate local resources into their national economies, and impose a
national identity on local populations.38

36. There is now a vast literature on postcolonial and subaltern studies, but see especially:
Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99
(December 1994): 1477–83; Florencia Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern
Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review 99 (December
1994): 1491–1515; Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1998);
and Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (New York, 2001). See also
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bour-
geois World (Berkeley, 1997); Emily S. Rosenberg, “Turning to Culture,” in Gilbert M. Joseph,
Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the
Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC, 1998), 497–514; Andrew J.
Rotter, “Saidism without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History,” American Historical
Review 105 (October 2000): 1205–17; the roundtable, “Empires and Intimacies: Lessons from
(Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 829–97; and
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
(Berkeley, CA, 2002). I am again indebted to Yuji Tosaka for his help with this section on
subaltern and postcolonial studies.
37. Rosenberg, “Considering Borders,” in Hogan and Paterson, eds., Explaining the History
of American Foreign Relations.
38. My discussion of borderlands is guided especially by an essay of one of my former stu-
dents, Nathan J. Citino, “The Global Frontier: Comparative History and the Frontier-
Borderlands Approach,” in Hogan and Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign
Relations. See also Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking
of Early America (Baltimore, MD, 1997); Gregory H. Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural
Encounters and Continental Conquest (New York, 1997); José David Saldívar, Border Matters:
16 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

State-building and identity formation were therefore integral to the frontier

experience, as Nathan Citino has argued, and not to the American experience
alone. Indeed, Citino and others have argued that diplomatic historians can
learn much from their counterparts in Western history, who have pioneered
comparative frontier studies or who have seen the frontier experience as inte-
gral to the development of a global capitalist economy.39 By combining
postcolonial approaches with the new borderlands history and by adding a com-
parative and transnational dimension, diplomatic historians can explore how
cultural encounters and imperial rivalries shaped individual identities, how
states were formed, how local economies were integrated into the global system,
and how transnational forces often eroded the bases of national power. In the
process, moreover, they can reinvigorate the study of early American diplomacy,
even as they explode the myth of American exceptionalism.
In many ways, Matthew Connelly’s recent book illustrates the themes I’ve
been discussing and presents a model of diplomatic history in a global age.
Following the lead of those interested in world history and in the history of
borderlands, Connelly borrows as well from the insights of subaltern studies,
postcolonial theory, and discourse analysis to write an international history of
Algeria’s struggle for independence. Using multiarchival sources to locate
agency in this struggle and to outline the way different actors influenced each
other, he also situates that struggle in a longer record of economic, social,
and cultural transformation in a borderland between East and West, between
North and South, between the Atlantic, Arab, and African worlds. In his ren-
dering, the Algeria story is not only the story of governments but of actors
outside the state, not only of the Cold War but also of international forces and
global structures independent of that epic struggle. It is part of a larger narra-
tive of religious, racial, and ethnic conflict, of population growth and global
migrations, of shifting identities and the rising influence of world opinion—all
of which nourished nationalist sentiment, aggravated cultural conflicts, and
contributed ultimately to the diplomatic and military outcome of the Algerian
conflict.40
To be sure, Akira Iriye is right when he claims that American diplomatic
historians have not done enough to disconnect international history from the
history of the nation itself, just as they have left the history of borderlands,
which is really the history of empires, to colonial and early American histori-

Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings
Donnan, eds., Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge, 1998);
Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,
and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June
1999): 814–41; the special issue “Rethinking History and the Nation-State,” Journal of Amer-
ican History 86 (September 1999): 439–697; and Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian
Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
39. Citino, “The Global Frontier.”
40. Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, especially the preface and the introduction.
 The “Next Big Thing” : 17

ans, historians of the American West, world historians, and specialists in Amer-
ican studies who are more comfortable with postcolonial and other theories.41
Nevertheless, Matthew Connelly, Mary Renda, Mark Bradley, Nathan Citino,
Eileen Scully, and others have started to combine the study of formal diplomacy
with a wider analysis of international relations defined broadly to include non-
state actors and transnational forces, just as others have followed Michael Hunt
in exploring the racial and gender ideologies that shaped foreign policy, and still
others have followed Emily Rosenberg in borrowing from cultural studies and
discourse analysis.42
Taken together, this body of scholarship gives hope that diplomatic history
is on the edge of a great renaissance. This scholarship includes work I have not
mentioned here, such as the exciting work being done in the area of history and
memory. I have not meant to diminish the significance of this work, nor the
work that explores more traditional topics and paradigms, any more than I have
meant to diminish work, like my own, that employs a corporatist paradigm or
explores the important connections between foreign relations and state forma-
tion. Instead, I have tried to highlight new avenues of exploration that hold
some promise of reviving our field. There is nothing new or startling in my
suggestions. Like Lynn Hunt and Charles Maier, like Emily Rosenberg and
Akira Iriye, I urge that we make room for those scholars who are internation-
alizing American history and open our minds to the possibility of a de-centered
history that is less preoccupied with the state or with the national project and
more preoccupied with non-state actors and international relations. I urge all
of this even while calling as well for continued work on the internal sources of
American foreign policy, on the enduring importance of nationalism, on the
role of the state in international relations, and on the influence of geopolitics
on state policy.
If the preceding summarizes my sense of where the intellectual currents
should carry us, how do we navigate our course, and on what ship should we
set sail? In this part of my remarks, I endorse the agenda for change laid out by
the American Studies Association when it forged the International American
Studies Association, and by the Organization of American Historians when it
launched the La Pietra meetings and the Project on Internationalizing the Study
of American History. I urge our society to emulate these organizations in their
efforts to integrate American history into world history, in their support for
more language training and study abroad experiences for our students and
younger colleagues, and in their efforts to understand both the “historiocity of
nation-making,” the process by which identities are formed and boundaries are

41. Iriye, “Internationalizing International History,” 49–50.

42. Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987), and Eileen P.
Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942
(New York, 2001). See the preceding notes for the works by other authors cited in this
paragraph.
18 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

negotiated, and the world of international relationships that exists outside the
nation and beyond the state.43
At the same time, I recommend, as I have before, an organizational frame-
work that is suitable to the new diversity in our field and the new interest in
international history. I would like to say that I stand before you as the last pres-
ident of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. But I doubt
if that will be the case, and not just because another president has already been
elected. On the contrary, I learned how difficult it is to promote change, even
change that seemed so desirable, during my years as editor of Diplomatic History.
I mention only “the battle of the bird,” as we used to call it in the editorial
office. That battle commenced when I proposed removing the eagle from the
journal’s cover, claiming that it was too nationalistic, if not militaristic, and
should be replaced with a more modern look and a global symbol. Suffice it to
say that it took several years and many arguments to negotiate that change, so
I am not especially sanguine about the prospects for change on a much larger
scale. Nevertheless, I urge the new president of SHAFR and all SHAFR
members to transform our organization by embracing historians in other fields
whose work clearly falls within the framework of international history and the
history of imperialism. These might include colleagues in American studies,
subaltern studies, and postcolonial studies who are working on the cultural and
literary aspects of imperialism. It would include those in the new Western
history whose work on comparative borderlands involves both imperial history
and international history. And it would include those scholars who study inter-
national relations outside the American frame. I’m thinking here of the large
number of historians, such as Charles Maier, or my State Department colleague
Roger Louis, or my friend Carole Fink, whose work focuses on the interna-
tional history of particular nations or regions, such as those working in British
imperial history, or European international history, or the history of coloniza-
tion and decolonialization, which is an exciting and burgeoning field much
informed by the recent turn to postcolonial and subaltern studies.
Taking this step would probably double the size of our organization and
require its renaming, to something like the Society for Historians of Interna-
tional Relations. Our journal would have to change as well. It would have to
become the journal of record not only for Americanists but also for Asianists,
Europeanists, Africanists, and all other non-Americanists interested in interna-
tional history regardless of their national or regional frame of reference. The
journal, too, would have to be renamed, becoming something like International
Relations: A Journal of Comparative and International History, and would have to
be open to articles dealing not only with state-to-state relations but also with
nonstate actors in the international sphere and with the cultural, literary, social,
and economic aspects of international affairs.

43. La Pietra Report, 10.

 The “Next Big Thing” : 19

What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a course? First, the short-
comings. Changing the name of our organization and the title of our journal
means running the risk of losing our historical focus on particular subjects, such
as the American nation, its policy-making elites, its diplomacy, and the sources
of that diplomacy. To be sure, work on these subjects would continue, but if
they shared the spotlight with so many other subjects would we not lose our
identity as diplomatic historians? What is more, to the degree that we widen
the angle of our lens then to that degree we require new training and new
research tools, particularly more language training, more study abroad, more
preparation in area studies, and more familiarity with the innovative analytical
approaches in related fields, such as those emerging from the new Western
history, subaltern studies, or postcolonial theory. Under these circumstances,
might we not mourn the loss of our identity as Americanists, as well as diplo-
matic historians, and might we wonder, too, if the virtues of specialization, so
much a part of American academic life, had been lost to an amateurish sam-
pling of disciplines too numerous and broad to be mastered?
I can hear other complaints as well, such as the conviction that perfectly bad
books can be written in any language, not just English, and that multiarchival
research is no substitute for inventive thinking and careful analysis. And what
about the conviction that the state, particularly the American state, still matters
in global affairs; that such traditional topics as warmaking and peacemaking are
as important today as they were when the field of diplomatic history began; that
nations, including the American nation, still exist and still provide a legitimate
framework for historical analysis; and that for all these reasons it is desirable to
have an organizational home for scholars who study such matters and a journal
that will publish their work.
I share many of these complaints and convictions, and thus remain convinced
that traditional diplomatic history, the study of policy formation and state-to-
state relations, should not be ignored by our journal or our society, however
they are named. But at the same time I am convinced that intellectual diversity
and pluralism are healthy in general and good for us in particular. Changing
names will help us to capture that pluralism, promote the kind of interdiscipli-
narity that lies at the heart of intellectual life in the postmodern period, and
further improve the quality of the journal itself, whatever its name. Try as I
might during my years as editor, I could never get our submission rate as high
as it needed to be. Publishing four articles an issue resulted in a submission to
publication ratio that was too small to guarantee quality control, which is one
reason we moved to a varied format that included more review essays and
roundtables. To be sure, these additions were useful to our readers. They gave
us an opportunity to explore new topics and methodologies and thus helped
Diplomatic History to position itself as a real journal of record, which it now is.
But publishing these roundtables and review essays also had the advantage of
reducing the number of scholarly articles that appeared in each issue, in effect
making us less dependent on voluntary submissions that were coming in at a
20 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

rate too low to guarantee a high quality publication. Over the years, one way
or another and for one reason or another, we drove the submission rate up,
drove the publication rate down, and eventually achieved a submission-to-
publication ratio of approximately 8-1, before submissions began to decline
again in the last years of my editorship.
Although good editors like Robert Schulzinger and Thomas Zeiler, who
himself has talked about globalizing diplomatic history, will work constantly to
recruit more submissions, there is no escaping the fact that as diplomatic his-
torians disappear from history departments and as young scholars go elsewhere
for publication outlets it will become more difficult to fill Diplomatic History
with high quality material.44 What is more, our journal and our field have
become so narrowly focused on the Cold War that some of the best scholar-
ship on imperialism, borderlands, and comparative and international history is
now being published by other journals, such as the Journal of World History, the
Journal of the Early Republic, the Western History Quarterly, and the Pacific His-
torical Review, all of which appear as more natural outlets for scholars who see
themselves specializing in Atlantic history, frontier history, or comparative and
world history, rather than diplomatic history. Then, too, as noted earlier, Diplo-
matic History faces intense competition from journals that concentrate on the
same kind of history that has been our bread and butter for years, and this com-
petition will also make it difficult to maintain the quality of our enterprise.
For these and other reasons, I urge SHAFR to steer the same course set by
other organizations, namely the Organization of American Historians and the
American Studies Association. Besides the agenda which they have proposed
and which I endorse, and besides renaming our organization and our journal, I
believe strongly that we should hold our annual meetings jointly with the Amer-
ican Historical Association or the Organization of American Historians, at least
every other year, and should make every effort to recruit conference papers
from scholars in other fields who are working on international subjects. Such a
course, much like reinventing and renaming our journal, will make acceptance
rates more competitive, improve quality, and reconnect us to colleagues in other
fields of history. Taken together with the other steps I have suggested, it will
help to increase our numbers and enhance our presence in the larger profes-
sion. It will give us a bigger voice more easily heard and less likely to be ignored,
which is important at a time when diplomatic historians still feel besieged, when
history departments are eliminating positions in our field, when we have trouble
getting program slots at annual meetings of the peak associations, when there
is seldom a diplomatic historian holding office in these associations, and when
major journals seem closed to much of our scholarship.
As this suggests, I believe that an open door policy and internationalization
are the best ways, perhaps the only ways, to prevent the marginalization of our

44. Thomas W. Zeiler, “Just Do It! Globalization for Diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic
History 25 (Fall 2001): 529–51.
 The “Next Big Thing” : 21

field in academic circles. It will give a home to other diplomatic historians, such
as European international historians, who do not have a home of their own. It
will bring new theories and methodologies into the field and keep traditional
diplomatic history from becoming a segregated specialty found increasingly
in political science rather than history departments. It will highlight our own
history of multiarchival research, put us in touch again with the history of
foreign relations before the Cold War, and recapture for our field some of the
very important subjects, such as the study of imperialism and frontiers, that are
being usurped by specialists in other fields. In these and other ways it will
refocus the limelight on diplomatic history as international history, making it,
as Lynn Hunt suggested, “the next big thing” in historical studies.
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