Study the historian before you begin to study the facts, E. H. Carr once cautioned. When you read a work of history always listen for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog.' There is indeed a loud buzzing in William Becker's article on the Williams school of diplomatic history. Like a host of other orthodox historians thrown on the defensive since the mid-1960s, Becker seeks to break the increasing domination of the historiography of American foreign policy by New Left scholars. His strategy is disingenuous: Try to show that the iron and steel industry is a major exception to the revisionist claim of a consensus at the end of the 1890s on the reality of an industrial glut and the pressing need for world markets to relieve it. Hold that this consensus is the foundation upon which the revisionists build their entire interpretation of twentieth-century foreign policy. Then the exceptionalism of the iron and steel industry shakes, if it does not undermine, the whole strucure of New Left scholarship. Finally, once the task of destroying the revisionists has been completed and the wreckage carried away, remaining scholars, Becker believes, again will have to concentrate on policy makers and politicians and on the international, political, and bureaucratic context in which they worked (p. 248). Put another way, such scholars will no longer have to face the unpleasant questions raised by the New Left's extension of diplomatic history into the arena of economics, ideology, power, and social structure. Becker's buzzing, in short, sounds like a throwback to the days when the only valid histories of American foreign policy were thought to emanate from the State Department, establishment scholars, and their in-house critics. If Becker has bold pretensions, his methods are deplorable. Take, for example, his handling of the place of foreign markets in the response of the iron and steel industry to the depression of the 1890s. Some manufacturers, like Carnegie Steel, did sell abroad at times, but this, according to Becker, was primarily a passive reaction to unusual conditions in foreign markets and falling prices at home; it was not, as the revisionists would have it, an active effort to solve such depression-