The Study of American Foreign Relations: National History or International History?

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Dickens's classic statement about prerevolutionary France might serve as an equally apt observation about the current state of American diplomatic history. Signs of robust health abound. SHAFR's last three summer meetings each attracted over two hundred participants, extraordinary figures for any subfield and the highest since the organization's first national meeting in 1975. The work published in this journal grows more sophisticated with each issue, and the number of article submissions continues to mount. University and commercial publishers actively solicit our manuscripts. Some works in diplomatic history even manage to attract an enthusiastic readership outside academe, as demonstrated most recently by Paul Kennedy's runaway best-seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.1 At the undergraduate level, courses in American foreign relations register impressive enrollments. A growing number of American diplomatic historians, moreover, teach courses on the Vietnam War that rank among the most popular at their respective universities.