Tag: formation essay

I start with a cliché.  I was destined to be a historian of international affairs.  An early memory I have is sitting on my father’s lap, while he read the evening newspaper and smoked.  This would be about 1953.  I was five years old.  My father had spent the day in hard physical work as…

I was supposed to be a lawyer.  That’s what my parents had told me; I was good at arguing, I liked school, and I was really interested in politics.  But something went terribly wrong (or right, depending on your perspective) and my professional life took another path into political science and specifically the study of…

Two-time defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously remarked that there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.[2] Scholars and researchers aim at the known unknowns but should remain receptive to the unknown unknowns that may reveal themselves and upend the analysis.  Be open to those who disagree; sometimes they are right.  Reassessment is a virtue…

“So how do you compare women’s status in the U.S. and Japan?” Despite advance preparation, I had not anticipated this question.  I froze.  No, I was not defending my master’s thesis.  The question was posed by an immigration officer at Milwaukee International Airport.  I was returning to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after a winter…

It is an honor to join my distinguished colleagues in relating my career as an historian; but it is also a daunting task to create a useful and coherent narrative of the paths I have followed.

“Do they do the Cold War in Utrecht?” was the first question I was asked after braving a cloud of volcanic ash to arrive at the prestigious International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War in Washington DC in April 2010.  Such was my enthusiasm to join, that I took my suitcase to Amsterdam Airport…

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment at which I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Political Science or to focus on political theory.  I think of it more as a slow drift.  I grew up until 13 in Ethiopia and Botswana.  My dad, a biologist, taught at Addis Ababa University (AAU) and the University…

The story of the development of my professional life as a historian is like history itself: serendipitous, hard to predict, yet wedded to the times.  It has depended on multiple influences and a series of fortuitous accidents.  Special mentors, good friends, and generous colleagues have made a huge difference.  Travel, too, has played an important…

I think I always loved the study of history, even at New York City’s Bronx High School of Science, where one of my social studies teachers introduced me to historical revisionism by questioning in class the high opinion in which the textbooks then held President Woodrow Wilson. By the time I entered the City College…

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…