Founded in 1967 - Incorporated in 1972
It is an honor to be kicking off the blog for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for the fall of 2011. I thank Andrew Johns, Brian Etheridge, and the officers of SHAFR for the invitation, and I look forward to an excellent year of diverse debates and dynamic discussions. For this column, [...]
I’ll take up the point raised by Shane Maddock’s recent post on moving beyond the Cold War. I share his feeling that the focus on the conflict has imposed its own “interpretive framework” on scholarship in U.S. foreign relations and international history generally and that this scaffolding can limit our understanding of a slew of [...]
The Cold War ended twenty years ago, but it remains the preeminent focus of historians of U.S. foreign relations. The disappearance of the Soviet Union also prompted few changes in U.S. national security policy. One could chalk up both phenomena to inertia. Once a field begins to focus heavily on a period or question, subsequent [...]