Confessions of an Ex-Historian

It was easy to decide on history as a graduate school path in the 1960s—the Kennedy years, the Cold War, and the baby boomers. It was almost as easy to choose diplomatic history as a specialization—with the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War. China begged, too, for attention. These factors, plus an outstanding undergraduate history teacher, led me to the University of Wisconsin, where I pursued a PhD, initially under the left-leaning (but, as I eventually came to conclude, right-thinking) William Appleman Williams. The dissertation, “Americans in China and the Formulation of American Policy,” was to be the centerpiece of my career, but what was not “easy” was finding a harbor professionally. Instead, I became like Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” taking a series of temporary positions and remaining on the fringes of the profession, teaching, writing (one article was reprinted twenty years later), and rubbing shoulders with other diplomatic historians who are still good friends. Ironically, the publication in Diplomatic History came just as I exited from history into the corporate world, a move necessitated through bad timing, economy, luck, or, perhaps, lack of talent.

China · Diplomacy · Diplomatic history · Economic history · International relations · Luck · Political science · Theology · World history · Academic Freedom and Politics · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Law · Military History and Strategy