I have never been one for introspection. I tend to look forward, not backward. I suppose, however, that a career in international politics is a natural choice for me, given my own family history. If not for World War II, my parents would not have met. Then, global politics became a family affair, with relatives…
Category: Formation Essay
H-Diplo Essay 437- Roger Dingman on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
How did I become the American international and naval historian that I am? I suppose it all began with stories. Bible stories on Friday afternoons at the Catholic elementary school I attended. Stories from the Book of Mormon that my grandmother told me. Stories depicted in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists’ murals at the…
H-Diplo Essay 435- John Lamberton Harper on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
n the beginning was a name: John “Jack” Lamberton, the twin of Hugh, and one of my mother’s four brothers. They grew up in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in the 20s and 30s. Their father, Robert E. Lamberton, was the Republican mayor of Philadelphia at the time of his death in 1941. After Pearl…
H-Diplo Essay 400- Danielle Fosler-Lussier on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
I came to diplomatic history when the methods and knowledge base of my home discipline, musicology, were not quite sufficient to answer the questions I needed to ask. I am still a musicologist. But my engagement with diplomatic history, and with history more broadly, has been formative for my work. I believe, too, that musicology…
H-Diplo Essay 397- Sheila Fitzpatrick on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Becoming a historian was perhaps over-determined in my family. My father, Brian Fitzpatrick, wrote books on Australian economic and labour history; my mother Dorothy taught history; and my younger brother, David Fitzpatrick, would become a distinguished historian (of twentieth-century Ireland) in his turn. But both David and I tried at first to avoid our fate,…
H-Diplo Essay 395- Eliot A. Cohen on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
My career has been, I suppose, that of a changeling – an historian trapped in a political scientist’s body, an occasional bureaucrat and diplomat, a Dean and a pundit. My field has been that of ‘hard,’ i.e., military national security, but also military history, and some topics much further afield, to include a current project…
H-Diplo Essay 393- Paul Betts on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Growing up in 1970s Phoenix was hardly an obvious starting point for a career as a historian of Modern Europe. In formal terms of American history, Arizona was one of the newest political entities of the New World, having only acquired statehood in 1912, the last territory in the contiguous United States to do so,…
H-Diplo Essay 390- Jacques E.C. Hymans on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
This is the story of the winding path from my arrival at grad school to my dissertation and first book, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy.[2] My hope is that a step-by-step account of my journey will serve as useful comparative data for young scholars embarking on their own paths.
H-Diplo Essay 387- Charles E. Neu on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
I was brought up in a small town in west-central Iowa, where my father was a lawyer and long-time mayor. He was a conservative Republican, critical of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal; Charles Tansill’s Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, was his favorite book.[1] Politicians would seek him out in…
H-Diplo Essay 386- Vladislav Zubok on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
H-Diplo asked me to contribute to this new series about the formative years of scholars who do diplomatic and political international history. As I was thinking about my assignment, it occurred to me that I was one of the very few and privileged who grew up and studied in the Soviet Union at the end…