When I entered Colgate University in 1956, I arrived with the vaguest of vocational goals. In secondary school, I had picked up a love of history, in part prompted by assiduous stamp collecting, and I entered college with the nebulous aspirations (in order of preference) of being a high-school history teacher-cum-track coach, journalist, lawyer, or…
Category: Formation Essay
H-Diplo Essay 206- John Milton Cooper, Jr. on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Many years ago, when I was giving a talk in Austin, Robert Divine introduced by commenting that I had stayed with World War I while other diplomatic historians were moving forward in the twentieth century to work on World War II and the Cold War. “I guess I’m just stuck in the same rut,” was…
H-Diplo Essay 204- Elizabeth Schmidt on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
My route to becoming an academic, and more specifically, a historian of Africa, was a circuitous one. A child of the 1960s, I was raised in a family with a strong concern for social justice in the era of the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. I joined my parents (a historian and a librarian)…
H-Diplo Essay 203- Cynthia Enloe on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
It was an ordinary noontime at Berkeley in September 1964. The morning fog had burned off, so the sun was shining as we set up our modest bridge tables on the sidewalk just outside the entrance to the University of California campus. There were half a dozen of us at little tables there that day,…
H-Diplo Essay 201- William B. Quandt on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Several currents came together to shape my career as a political scientist with a special interest in the Middle East and in American foreign policy. The first involved two moments of living abroad at a formative time in my life. Then there were a number of fine academics at Stanford and MIT in the 1960s…
H-Diplo Essay 200- Edwin E. Moise on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
My father, also named Edwin E. Moise, had more influence on the way I think about history than any of the professors who were formally my teachers. He was a mathematician, but had a wide range of other interests, including history both ancient and modern. I always planned to follow him into academia, but the…
H-Diplo Essay 198- Robert Jervis on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
For as long as I can remember—and long before I knew there was a field called Political Science with a specialization in International Politics—I was intrigued by politics. This was due to a combination of what must have been my in-born nature, the strongly political atmosphere of New York in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and,…
H-Diplo Essay 197- Robert Bothwell on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
I once wrote an official history, dealing with the activities of a Canadian publicly owned and government-directed corporation.[2] It was a late arrival in the library of World War Two official histories, researched in the early 1980s and published in 1984. It was closely related to its American and British counterparts (the field was very…
H-Diplo Essay 196- N. Piers Ludlow on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
It might well have seemed inevitable that I would become a historian of postwar Western Europe in general and the European integration process in particular. My childhood was divided mainly between England, Italy, and Belgium, with shorter spells in France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands. I was schooled in Italian, French and English. And…
H-Diplo Essay 195- Emily Rosenberg on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Like most roads in life, my path to becoming what was traditionally called a ‘diplomatic historian’ was full of chances. Even my survival as a 4.5 lb. preemie born in a ‘birthing home’ in Sheridan Wyoming in 1944 was a roll of the dice. As a (female) child, raised in Billings, Montana, during the 1950s…