A smallish town in the Virginia Appalachians might seem impossibly remote from France. Even so, France was actively present in my home town in the 1930s and 1940s. Lexington is a college town. Two professors of French were frequent dinner guests of my parents. My piano teacher and church choir director, another frequent dinner guest,…
Category: Formation Essay
H-Diplo Essay 241- Louise P. Woodroofe on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1973, where we lived until 1981, before moving to Butler, a working class town about 30 miles north of the city. Western Pennsylvania’s steel mills were in the midst of closing, as was Butler’s Pullman-Standard Plant, devastating the local economy. The one uniting solace across race, class, and…
H-Diplo Essay 238- David L. Anderson on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
On June 1, 1968, I received both my BA diploma from Rice University with a major in history and my I-A draft card from the Selective Service. Unforeseeable to me then was that my career as a historian and the American war in Vietnam would be thereafter interconnected. On that beautiful spring day in Houston,…
H-Diplo Essay 235- James Goldgeier on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
Some people might know when they are in college that they want to go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. I did not. I thought initially after college, I would pursue campaign work, and my first job—which I started in February of my senior year—was managing a city council campaign in Boston. We lost…
H-Diplo Essay 233- Elizabeth Cobbs on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
I thought of myself as calm. Competing for a grant that paid for three years of graduate study at any university in the nation seemed straightforward, even though $100,000 was at stake and I had at most $500 in savings. The interview should have been easy, plus I was hard to rattle.
H-Diplo Essay 232- J. Ann Tickner on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
My journey towards becoming a feminist scholar has taken a somewhat unusual route. My interest in international affairs, especially working towards a more peaceful and just world, began when I was a child experiencing the bombing of London during World War II. After the war we moved to the United States where my father worked…
H-Diplo Essay 230- Warren F. Kimball on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
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…
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…