International Historians Research Articles

Notes for Tom Hughes’s Funeral Homily: University of Virginia Chapel, 6 April 2014

Staudenmaier pays tribute to international scholar and technology historian Tom Hughes. Here, he shares what his friendship with Hughes was like and and recall how it all started.

‘Time of Troubles’: Arnold J. Toynbee's twentieth century

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) has long been neglected or discounted by scholars of international relations and historians of international thought. Yet his contributions to International Affairs, as well as his Surveys of international affairs and his A study of history demonstrate both his capacity for acute interpretation of contemporary events and the depth of his learning about past international societies. This article examines his analysis of mid-twentieth century international relations, that ‘Time of Troubles’ which he believed would only be escaped through a recovery of ‘creativity’ and profound change in the ways in which world politics were practised. It explores the foundations of his approach to the field, demonstrated both in his Surveys of international affairs and his twelve volume magnum opus, A study of history, as well as his essays in journals. It analyses his diagnosis of the causes of our contemporary ‘Time of Troubles’, in the light of past episodes in world history Toynbee thought analogous to that present condition of international relations. And it traces his retreat from political solutions to the challenges faced in the twentieth century and his movement towards religious responses as a putative alternative. It concludes by arguing that Toynbee deserves recognition, not simply as a pioneering world historian or a controversial interpreter of the politics of the Middle East, but as an acute commentator on the international relations of a troubled age.

The Ubiquitous Presence of the Past? Collective Memory and International History

This article explores the relationship between international history and memory studies. It argues that collective memory demands to be taken much more seriously than it has been by international historians to date and clarifies what this might involve. It comprises four sections. The first provides an overview of the growth of memory studies, identifying some recent trends and conceptual issues. The second explores how international historians have engaged with it hitherto, revealing that while memory has emerged onto the agenda of the discipline, analysis of it still remains rather patchy and underdeveloped. It also contextualises a putative turn to memory against the on-going ‘cultural turn’ in international history. The third lays out a research agenda by identifying some of the core topics to be differentiated in the study of memory within international history, exploring the conceptual issues these entail and pointing to relevant resources from within the memory-studies literature that speak to them. A final section anticipates and discusses some potential objections to the argument of the article. It concludes that taking the challenge of memory studies seriously may demand a thoroughgoing reorientation of our practice.

Bringing the Transnational In: Writing Human Rights into the International History of the Cold War

One of the most interesting innovations in recent international history writing is the adoption of transnational approaches. This article echoes earlier calls for international historians to integrate transnational methods more fully into their work by highlighting the salience of human rights and influence of human rights activism as aspects that would otherwise be largely left out of the history of the Cold War. Such methodological innovation is essential to a deeper understanding of the Cold War.

Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present. Edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex, UK, 2013; 512 Pages. Price £22.99, €27.60, ISBN 978-1-4443-3866-9

An engaging account of today’s contemporary art world that features original articles by leading international art historians, critics, curators, and artists, introducing varied perspectives on the most important debates and discussions happening around the world.

International History and the Study of Public Opinion: Towards Methodological Clarity

International historians have long been fascinated by public opinion and its influence on policy-making, citing it frequently as one of the many factors that inform foreign-policy choices. However, historians – and international historians in particular – have yet to develop any substantial or rigorous methodological frameworks capable of revealing the actual influence of popular opinion at the highest levels of diplomatic policy. This article intends to redress this deficiency by outlining a methodological approach that elucidates the role of public opinion in the decision-making process. In so doing, it will also explore the tensions between different approaches to the study of international history, notably the apparent divergence between traditional ‘diplomatic’ history on the one hand and the more theoretically diffuse ‘international’ history on the other. The conceptual framework forwarded here will suggest that the two approaches need not be in opposition, at least when seeking to explain the formative role of public opinion on foreign-policy making. Indeed, the careful application of inter-disciplinary theoretical frameworks not only enriches our understanding of international history in its totality, but also reveals much about the diplomatic fulcrum of our discipline.

Waiting for Monsieur Bergson: Nicholas Murray Butler, James T. Shotwell, and the French Sage

This analysis follows upon an article that previously was published in Diplomacy and Statecraft (2010) on Norman Angell's relationship with French thinking and political life. These two papers suggest international historians should look much more widely for our sources of understanding the policy options of the Powers in the early twentieth century than the habitual diplomatic documents and the like. They also aim to explore how ideas become policies, seen through the eyes of particular key actors. This analysis looks at the relations between the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, and a contemporary major American intellectual, Nicholas Murray Butler, between 1913 and 1932 using their letters as a basis. Bergson's fraught relationship with Butler sheds some light on Franco–American relations during the turbulent decades they knew each other. The article also looks at the thinking of James T. Shotwell, a long-time collaborator with Butler and, more generally, at the approaches to the contemporary international relations of their day that underpin and mark out American and French differences about how to construct a global order after the First World War.

Review: The Triumph of the Dark European International History 1933-1939

THE TRIUMPH OF THE DARK European International History 1933-1939 Zara S. Steiner Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 1248 pp, US$65.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0199212002With the second and final volume of her study of European international politics between 1919 and 1939, Zara Steiner has completed what is now the touchstone for several generations and beyond of international historians, international relations specialists, and the wider reading public interested in the period between the two world wars of the 20th century. Together with the first volume, this study is an immediate classic - one based on 20 of research and, before that, a distinguished scholarly record and accumulation of knowledge stretching back to the late 1950s. Demonstrating the same deft analytical hand that dissected the vagaries of European international history from the Paris peace conference to the collapse of the Weimar republic, a command of English and foreign language sources, and lucid prose, Steiner provides an exegesis that neither preaches about nor excuses the generation of statesmen, politicians, military leaders, diplomats, and journalists who dominated Europe and hold responsibility for the outbreak of a second world war in 1939. In the first volume of her study, she argued that by the end of the 1920s, the problems spawned by the First World War were resolved and continental stability had emerged from the chaos of war and revolution. This process was then undermined by the hinge years of the Great Depression, beginning in late 1929 when the disruption of the international economy, the concomitant undermining of democratic government, and the rise of radical prescriptions to meet the apparent failure of capitalism and democratic governance emerged.In this context, the central figure of this book is Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor after January 1933, supreme German leader after August 1934, and fountainhead of National Socialist ideology. Steiner's initial chapter, Brown dawn, looks closely at the Nazi revolution and the end of the quest for disarmament. She sees Hitler's ideology as nourishing the roots of a foreign policy designed to make Germany supreme in Europe and laying the basis for an eventual struggle with the United States to make Germany the sole world power: territorial expansion to the east, whereby the newly created states, including German- speaking Austria, would have to be brought within the Reich; the complete destruction of Nazidom's ideological enemy, Bolshevik Russia; and cleansing Europe of its subhuman races, especially the Jews. Through his dark social Darwinian lens, Hitler looked for the means and opportunity to achieve his foreign policy goals.Opportunism is central here. In his influential 1961 book, The Origins of the Second World War, the revisionist A.J. P. Taylor argued that Hitler did not follow a diplomatic blueprint but was pragmatic in foreign policy: announcing German rearmament in 1935, remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, forcing the annexation of Austria in March 1938, detaching the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia six months later, occupying the Czechoslovak rump in March 1939, and initiating the Polish crisis in September 1939. In contrast, Steiner shows clearly that while Hitler was opportunistic, he was an opportunist who knew where he was going. He gambled on inaction by the other great powers, took risks, and proved daring in exploiting the openings given to him. He took the initiative and the other powers' leaders reacted.In Steiner's estimation, these responses were crucial to the origins of the Second World War. Engaged in a pyrrhic competition among themselves, all the successor states except Czechoslovakia gradually moved into the German orbit because the new Bolshevik Russian threat differed little from the old tsarist one. In Italy, Benito Mussolini found common ground with Hitler after the Italian conquest of Abyssinia in May 1936 and led his country away from London and Paris, which had temporarily united with Rome in a vain effort to contain Germany. …

Conservative intellectuals and the Reagan–Gorbachev summits

Ronald Reagan's 1980 election represented the apex of the conservative intellectual movement's political success in America. While historians have thoroughly examined the movement's effect on domestic American politics, international historians have been more reluctant to evaluate conservative intellectuals’ influence on Reagan's foreign policy. This essay seeks to determine what can be better understood about America's foreign affairs by examining Reagan's reaction to the conservative intellectual movement's views on the Reagan–Gorbachev summits.

Rethinking the Middle East and North Africa in the Cold War

The new Cold War history has begun to reshape the ways that international historians approach the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the post-1945 era. Rather than treating the region as exceptional, a number of scholars have sought to focus on the historical continuities and transnational connections between the Middle East and other areas of the Third World. This approach is based on the notion that the MENA region was enmeshed in the transnational webs of communication and exchange that characterized the post-1945 global system. Indeed, the region sat not only at the crossroads between Africa and the Eurasian landmass but also at the convergence of key global historical movements of the second half of the 20th century. Without denying cultural, social, and political elements that are indeed unique to the region, this scholarship has drawn attention to the continuities, connections, and parallels between the Middle Eastern experience and the wider world.

Connections in the History of Textbook Revision, 1947–19521

In this article, I focus on connections between textbook revision forums between 1947 and 1952. I examine the interrelations between the textbook activities of UNESCO, the World Movement of Trade Unions, the international historian conferences in Speyer and two Franco-German co-operation projects. I thus try to understand how these interrelations impacted on the development of each of these forums and on textbook revision in general. I argue that the revision projects were not just embedded within a diplomatic and institutional framework but also in a set of relations that closely linked them, irrespective of their institutional and ideological foundations. Further, I propose to conceive of textbook revision not as an entirely fragmented mosaic of bilateral and multilateral projects, but as a more or less coherent transnational field.

Completing an Unfinished Jigsaw Puzzle: Cornelis Van Vollenhoven and the Study of International Law

This paper examines the views of the Dutch lawyer and philologist Cornelis van Vollenhoven (1874-1933) on how to study law and international law in particular. Van Vollenhoven assessed that international law was in a state of uncertainty and inchoateness which it was the lawyer’s obligation to transcend. Since most textbooks, with or without good reason, fail to mention him, Van Vollenhoven is one of those striking personalities one is likely to have heard about as an international legal historian but who remains nothing but a casual acquaintance nonetheless. This paper primarily sets out to elaborate on Van Vollenhoven’s ontological and epistemological views on international law thus shedding light on some aspects of his thought and writings that have not received the attention they deserve yet. Van Vollenhoven was both involved in scholarly work on international law and left behind various publications on legal methodology. The scholar willing to dig into his collected writings comes across a rather eclectic and hence probably unique though not highly original approach to the study of law. His endauvour to classify jurisprudence among the exact sciences combined with some of his political positions on international order and the law of the Dutch East Indies resulted in an empiricist, evolutionist, and institutionalist perspective according to which a scientific approach to international law boils down to the combination of three methods: a systematic, a historical, and a comparative one. This paper aims at providing a sketch of that approach.

The meaning of hostile bipolarization: Interpreting the origins of the Cold War

The origins of the Cold War have been the subject of numerous debates among international historians. On different occasions, historians have looked at International Relations Theory for insights and concepts to help understanding why and how the Cold War originated. While the postrevisionist paradigm was inspired by realism, for the last decade and a half, running parallel with broader theoretical developments in IR, large parts of the debate on the origins of the Cold War have focused on the role of ideas, ideology, and culture. However, the imported innovations had the effect of fragmenting our theoretical understanding of the origins of the Cold War, rather than offering a workable, coherent synthesis. Moreover, these accounts do not always sufficiently address problems of agency and causality. The debate on the origins of the Cold War, therefore, is in need of coherent theoretical frameworks which are capable of remedying these problems. This article argues that a possible way of generating such a framework is taking a closer look at hermeneutics and constructivism.

Families, Insanity, and the Psychiatric Institution in Australia and New Zealand, 1860-1914

International historians have begun to challenge the view that the nineteenth-century psychiatric hospital was a place of horrors and custody, and have shown that families were sometimes intimate with the institutions of the past, often participating in the process of institutional committal. This article explores the state of historical inquiry into families and insanity in Australia and New Zealand. It asserts that by re-examining patient cases we might find fresh insights into the dynamic between families and mental health. Through a close examination of archival sources, the article argues, we can see the presence of families 'inside' the asylum in several ways. Overall, the article suggests that institutional archives present both opportunity and risk for historians intent on discovering 'what happened' to the insane and their families.

Summitry as intercultural communication

Summitry is regularly in the news, most recently because of the G20 meeting in Washington DC in November 2008. This article explores the sometimes neglected cultural dimensions of summitry, drawing on recent work by cultural international historians and by theorists of intercultural communication, much of which addresses western relations with Asia. This article, however, argues that all international summitry is an intercultural act. Three historical case-studies are explored: Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938, Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1961 and Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985. In each case, cultural perceptions and expectations played a significant part in the outcome of the summit. The article also comments on the role of translation in international summitry.

There Was a Schlieffen Plan: New Sources on the History of German Military Planning

For almost ten years international military historians have been discussing Terence Zuber's thesis of the Schlieffen Plan being just a myth designed by the German general staff after the First World War to cover up the mistakes committed by German generals in that war. This debate, led with particular ferocity in War and History, is based on German files that Zuber was the first to study. The following paper, however, challenges Zuber's theories on the basis of files and maps Zuber failed to consider. It seeks to prove that there was a basic operational-strategic doctrine — the Schlieffen Plan — and Schlieffen's successor stuck unwaveringly to it, although a few operational modifications were made. This doctrine was even implemented by the Wehrmacht in the Second World War, albeit in a modified version.

International History, Religious History, Catholic History: Perspectives for Cross-Fertilization (1830—1914)

The essay explores what recent trends in international and religious (in particular, Catholic) history have to offer one another. On the one hand, the transformation of imperial history into global history and a new attention for the role of non-state actors in international politics are opening the eyes of international historians to religion as one of the main forces shaping the modern world. On the other hand, historians of religion are rediscovering the essentially transnational nature of their subject, and its enmeshment with politics at every turn. In the history of Catholicism, this takes the form of an aggiornamento of 'old-fashioned' themes such as ultramontanism, missionary expansion and the papacy. After having drifted apart for half a century, the two subdisciplines thus increasingly appear as natural allies in reconsidering the master narrative of modernity. The concept of 'religious internationalism', illustrated here through its Catholic variety, allows us to 'think together' the different aspects of religion's transformation into worldwide mass movements, and to grasp the key role of religion in creating a global public sphere that was conditioned by international politics, but in turn also refashioned the international system.

Summits: six meetings that shaped the twentieth century

'It is not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit.' Winston Churchill coined the term in 1950 but the temptation of summitry has been around for centuries. In this incisive and readable book, David Reynolds takes us from the Babylonians right up to Blair and Bush. But the core of his account is six case studies of modern summitry - made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction, and made into household news by the mass media. Using the records of the meetings, he explores how world leaders saw their opponents and how they played their own cards. He also reconstructs the enormous physical and emotional pressures upon them during encounters that could spell life or death for millions. The pioneer of modern summitry was Neville Chamberlain, whose dramatic flights to meet Hitler in September 1938 set patterns and taught lessons for all who followed. Some of the meetings involve a trio of leaders - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in 1945; Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978 - but the heart of the story are three superpower duels that span the Cold War. Drawing on newly-opened archives, Reynolds examines the disastrous face-off between Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961, which helped spark the Cuban missile crisis and America's disastrous war in Vietnam. He looks at the Moscow summit between Nixon and Brezhnev in 1972, which began a promising era of detente but whose Machiavellian negotiation by Nixon and Kissinger also helped ensure detente's decline. By contrast, the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Geneva in 1985 began a series of summits that brought the Cold War to a peaceful end. From it, Reynolds draws larger lessons for successful summitry. Written with verve and insight by a prize-winning international historian, Summits takes us into the minds of statesmen caught up in a bizarre mixture of competition and camaraderie as they stand, for a moment, on top of the world.

We Won't Be Fooled Again: Teaching Critical Thinking via Evaluation of Hoax and Historical Revisionist Websites in a Library Credit Course

ABSTRACT At Central Michigan University, librarians teach multiple sections of an eight-week, one-credit research skills class to hundreds of undergraduate students each semester. While the main focus of the course is to teach students how to find, use, and properly cite library resources, librarians also address critical thinking skills by designing lessons to teach World Wide Web organization and how to analyze the information found via search engines. Showing student's obvious hoax sites about “tree octopi” and “male pregnancy” introduces the concepts of critical thinking and Website analysis. Most students quickly refute the information on such sites. However, students have a more difficult time assessing social, historical, or political revisionist Web sites' validity. Contrasting those claims with evidence accepted by international courts, historians, and scientists is useful in pointing out the flaws of seemingly well documented but one-sided revisionist sites. There are dangers in exposing students to these groups via their Websites. Yet, it is important to do so in order to convey the importance of critical analysis of information. The authors discuss students' pre- and post-test (CMU's online assessment tool, the “research readiness self-assessment” [RRSA]) scores to determine whether critical thinking skills have improved.

Post-war and Pre-war

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, a few book editors seeking a silver lining, however slight, suggested that the global shock might generate a revival of international history. As time passed, works gendering (or engendering) the landscape or re-imagining the city remained dominant in the historical profession. Some international historians addressing very recent periods found a bandwagon and focused on cultural diplomacy, which was largely a post-1945 innovation, but the rest of the field continued to languish. Only time will tell if the optimism of the editors was justified, but whether or not ‘9/11’ (as Americans term it) had any causal role, we now have four studies directed to the international history of Europe in the inter-war era.