On Becoming Me. I can’t think of a better title. Being an historian is an essential, but not the only, part of ME. I’m writing this professional obituary during the COVID-19 pandemic which drives home the tenuousness of ‘normal.’ I cannot imagine that my rather peculiar and idiosyncratic stumbling into becoming a professional teacher-historian will…
Category: Formation Essay
H-Diplo Essay 228- Kathleen Burk on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
I have seldom followed a straight road in my writings on history. Rather, I have wandered where my interests at the time led me, leading a military history friend to urge that I concentrate my forces. The one constant in my working life has been an abiding interest in diplomacy. From the research and writing…
H-Diplo Essay 227- Michael A. Barnhart on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
I entered Northwestern in the fall of 1969 certain that I would become a lawyer. I was a dedicated debater in high school. Northwestern had an excellent debate program, and many of its majors in Public Address & Group Communication had gone on to top law schools.
H-Diplo Essay 225- Melvin Small on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
I was born in the Bronx in 1939 to a first-generation mother and a father who spent the first eight years of his life in western Russia. When, during the Cold War, I had to fill out a biographical form for my Hewlett, Long Island, elementary school, I wrote that my father was born in…
H-Diplo Essay 223- James I. Matray on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
H-Diplo Essay 223 Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars 30 April 2020 Telling One Historian’s Tale https://hdiplo.org/to/E223 Series Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii Essay by James I. Matray, California State University, Chico, and New Mexico State University, Emeritus My love affair with history began…
H-Diplo Essay 221- Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
World War II had just ended when my family moved to Harlech, in North Wales. Truckloads of U.S. soldiers were still a common sight in Harlech, and we kids used to run after them. We shouted, “Got any gum chum?” It was one of my first English-language phrases, Welsh being my mother tongue. Exposure to…
H-Diplo Essay 220- Richard H. Immerman on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
More than a half-century ago, the Cornell Daily Sun interviewed me as an exemplar of a graduating senior with no idea of what to do for the remainder of his/her life. I don’t think I ever knew, and I certainly don’t remember, why and how the reporter chose to feature me. Yet the article’s premise…
H-Diplo Essay 219- Geoffrey Roberts on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
I learnt the scholar’s craft through my membership of the British Communist Party (BCP). Born into a working-class family in Deptford, London, I joined the party and the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1969, aged 17. Crucial to that life-changing decision was the party’s opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Like…
H-Diplo Essay 217- Federico Romero on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
I went to college in 1972 and I had no idea I would eventually specialize in history. I had grown up in families with a decent, though not high, degree of education. My mother and my grandmothers were well-read, the men less so. To all of them, the intellectual world was a fascinating but distant…
H-Diplo Essay 215- John A. Thompson on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
Some historians study the past because they are fascinated by how different it is from the world they are living in, others do so because they want to understand that world better. I am one of the latter sort, which is a good part of the explanation for my choice to work in the field…
