What Bandwagon? Diplomatic History Today

Abstract

In his essay, Diplomatic History Bandwagon, Thomas W. Zeiler presents a general, much-needed, and tremendously useful survey of the state of the field for general readers and scholars working in other subfields of American history. Zeiler recapitulates how, despite forays into novel areas, the field suffered from a lack of recognition in mainstream history until twenty years ago, when a new generation intensified cooperation with other fields, including international history and cultural studies. That move, he feels, has re warded diplomatic history with the recognition it deserves, making it part of mainstream history once again. Zeiler underscores his argument by placing avalanche of studies into different subcategories, applauding innovative trends, and concluding that diplo matic historians today constitute an advance guard driving the bandwagon of interna tionalization, riding along with those who study mentalit?s and culture.1 And yet, there is a catch. Zeiler is not entirely happy with the results of the past twenty years. Like many diplomatic historians, he fears that change and adaptation might carry the profession over the edge, obscure important questions, and allow scholars to lose sight of the core of what they are supposed to be doing. That core, he contends, consists of studying official state records and appr?ci?t [ing] how functions at home and abroad.2 The real question for Zeiler, then, is not how to make sense of the merger be tween his field and other types of history but, instead, to assess how far diplomatic histo rians wish to venture in one of those novel directions without discarding the state as the central category of analysis. Stressing the original conception of diplomatic history, Zeiler makes a powerful plea for a stronger emphasis on the state. Zeiler believes that other historians should read and borrow from diplomatic historians because the latter group understands the meaning of the state and knows how to work in government archives. Studying discourse is fruit ful, he contemplates, but the state is relegated to a secondary role in American history at the peril of losing a sense of the nature of power, who captures it, who loses it, and how it is deployed. This time-honored tradition of understanding the state and power constitutes diplomatic history's essential contribution to general scholarship, and Zeiler