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…
Category: Formation Essay
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…
H-Diplo Essay 207- Justus D. Doenecke on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
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…
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…
