A Bibliography of American Peace History

Abstract

Perhaps the most perplexing human paradox is that, while cherishing survival, we choose war to preserve our existence. American history surveys and monographs are domi nated by discourses on war. War-making, battles, military leaders, and postwar plans are all described in terms of the glory and necessity of war. The vocabulary itself?the interwar period, postwar planning, the prewar economy, etc., makes it appear as though the United States has been in a state of war throughout its history. This emphasis on war is out of proportion to the actual amount of time Americans have spent fighting wars. Since the clock hours of peacetime do, in fact, far outweigh those of war, why do historians devote so much of their scholarship and teaching to the study of war and so little to the study of peace? Pacifists themselves did the lion's share of early peace writing. Using nar ratives, biographies, and autobiographies, early peace activists described their times and their hopes for a warless world. The experiences of the two world wars mocked the naivete of trying to abolish war through treaties, appeasement, or isolation. Peace history lost its momentum. Even the euphoria surrounding the international spirit after World War II was consumed by the realities of power politics, the Cold War, atomic weapons, and superpower mentalities. Peace history was rejuvena ted by the ideology of the 1960s; new methodologies of cliometrics and psycho history scarcely touched it, but the movement toward a more representative history that included women, minorities, the poor, and the less arti culate members of society influenced it greatly. In the 1960s, a major reassessment that would make peace history a permanent feature of American historiography began. Opponents of the Vietnam War demanded that pacifism become as much a part of scholarship and the college curriculum as the civil rights movement. Peace activists were joined by the general public in working to better under stand the roots of paci fism. The result of the desire to consider the philosophical foundations of pacifism and its practical applications produced an outpouring of scholarly work and curri culum development which continues into the present. Many of the important resources for studying peace are described below.