Politics and Foreign Relations

Abstract

These are good times for the of U.S. foreign relations history, as Thomas W. Zeil er 's lucid essay makes clear. Not as good as they could be, but let's not be too finicky. Job openings are up, books are winning major prizes and generating heated interpretive debates, and the field's organizational home, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (shafr), is in robust health. No less important, one detects in recent years a greater willingness on the part of social and cultural historians?long ascendant in the discipline in the United States?to tolerate and even embrace the propositions at the heart of diplomatic history: that high politics matters, that top-down approaches are worthy and important, and that the projection of American power and influence abroad over the past two plus centuries needs serious and sustained study. Perhaps as sure a sign as any of the field's resurgence was the decision by the editors of the distinguished Ox ford History of the United States series to publish a volume on foreign relations. George C. Herring's magisterial From Colony to Superpower is currently the only book in the series written on topical rather than temporal lines. Thus what stands out in this survey of the state of the field is the health of the field. Zeiler is an enthusiast, and although it would have been helpful to get more details on some of his suggestions?he calls, for example, for pulling the mainstream a bit back toward considerations of the state, but does not really develop the point?there can be no denying the basic thrust of his essay: we are seeing an extraordinary amount of imaginative, useful work being done by histo rians employing widely varying categories of analysis. This is all to the good. U.S. foreign relations is very much a Janus-faced field, looking outward as well as inward.1 But it is the outward that is getting the lion's share of attention these days. Interna tional history is all the rage, as Zeiler duly notes. The approach is hardly new?it is worth recalling that Samuel Flagg Bemis, Ernest R. May, and other giants in the were writ ing international history half a century and more ago. But only in recent years has it be