Discovering New Fields

I have very fond memories of Diplomatic History. Paul Holbo, editor at the time, added my article concerning Pearl Harbor and the election of 1944 to the first issue in winter 1977. This was an exciting experience for me. I was a young untenured assistant professor at Texas A&M University, and the article was taken from my first book, The Shadow of Pearl Harbor: Political Controversy over the Surprise Attack, 1941–1946 (College Station, TX, 1977). I suspect pickings were kind of thin for that first issue, so Holbo did a young scholar a great favor by placing my piece in what even then looked like an up and coming important journal. Very soon after the publication of the article, I made an abrupt course change in my field of study from diplomatic history to the emerging field of environmental history. This might seem peculiar, but it was driven by two concrete reasons. First, Texas A&M already had several diplomatic historians on their faculty, and I had yet to be placed on a tenure track. Thus, I saw the writing on the wall—I needed to distinguish my work in some fashion so my colleagues could justify keeping me. Second, I had begun to flirt with issues related to sanitary services, health, and urban growth while in graduate school. In 1972 I had been exposed to one of the earliest environmental history courses taught in the country—offered by the eclectic H. Wayne Morgan. The paper that I wrote for him on urban waste became an article that won a national prize and was published in Phi Alpha Theta’s The Historian. I thus saw a new scholarly path that I hoped would lead me to a permanent job. The trail was long and hard, but eventually it paid off. As a result, I have spent the bulk of my career writing and teaching about environmental history.

Diplomatic history · International relations · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology) · Sociology · Surprise · Suspect · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law · Psychology