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…
Category: Formation Essay
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…
H-Diplo Essay 213- William R. Keylor on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
I grew up in a small town named Jackson (population about 2,000) in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Northern California. My father was a car salesman and my mother was what used to be called a ‘homemaker.’ The town was in the middle of ‘Gold Rush country.’ The two gold mines…
H-Diplo Essay 212- Richard Ned Lebow on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
I arrived in New York Harbor in the autumn of 1942 as part of a group of 100 Jewish refugee children from France. We were off-loaded furtively at night after the immigration officials made themselves scare. Once ashore we were dispersed to orphanages. I had been kicked around and was in poor health and stunted…
H-Diplo Essay 211- Jeffrey P. Kimball on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
I was born of working-class, French-and-English-speaking, Catholic parents on 14 December 1941 at French Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana. When they were youngsters in the late twenties at the onset of the rural economic depression, my parents, Pearl Roy and Burnett Kimball, had separately fled rural Avoyelles Parish (north of Baton Rouge) in search of…
H-Diplo Essay 210- Anne Deighton on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
Chance seems to have played a very big part in the accounts of fellow historians who have been writing reflective pieces for H-Diplo on their formative years. So it has been for me. But I am aware that chance and serendipity are less likely to shape the careers of younger scholars today, for the formal…
H-Diplo Essay 208- John Lewis Gaddis on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
My home town in Texas has two claims to fame. Cotulla, founded in 1881 and located halfway between San Antonio and Laredo, quickly became notorious for its feuds, shootouts, and murders: it was, the El Paso Times reported five years later, “the toughest place” in the state.[1] In due course, though, it settled down, and…