American Diplomatic History: The State of the Art

Abstract

Richard Dean Burns, ed. Guide to American Foreign Relations since 1700. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, Inc., 1983.1311 + xxvi pp. Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds. American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1981.369 + xiii pp. Paul Gordon Lauren, ed. Diplomacy : New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy. New York: The Free Press, 1979. 286 + xvi pp. Gordon A. Craig, in his 1982 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, "The Historian and the Study of International Relations," focused his remarks on the paradoxical situation that characterizes the current position of diplomatic history. Despite the turbulent and often dis- illusioning record of international relations since 1945, both student and professional interest in diplomatic history has waned in recent years. Citing the records of the American Historical Association's annual meetings during the period from 1976 to 1982, Craig noted only five sessions per year out of 128 dealt with what he would call international relations. This decline of interest has been reflected in university departments, curricula and course enrollments. Indeed the appearance in the last six years of the journals Diplomatic History in the United States and The International History Review in Canada was as much a response to the declining proportion of articles on the history of international relations that appeared in the major historical journals in the 1960s and early 1970s as it was the result of the maturation of diplomatic historians. Nevertheless, while this erosion has been taking place. Craig observes, the writing of international history has become more sophisticated and penetrating. "We are a long way," he says, "from the time when the standard monograph in diplomatic history was literally copied out of the bound volumes of the Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office, tricked out with Latin tags and formidably arcane footnotes, and set forth to grace the lower shelves of university libraries."1 In other words, no longer can diplomatic history be dismissed by the quanti- fiers and social historians with G. M. Young's pitiless remark that it is "little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk," a reputation out from under which diplomatic historians have been struggling to climb ever since.2 Current writings are likely to examine topics, Craig suggests, "like the moral and intellectual roots and assumptions of national policy, domestic factors as determinants of policy, interagency competition in decision making, public opinion and the way in which it is influenced by the media, comparative political systems and ideological convergence, and much else" (p. 3).