Prize Winners! We've Got Prize Winners!

Friend of dcat Marc Selverstone recently won the 2010 Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Not only is Marc, who plies his trade at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, a fine scholar (obviously), he is also a truly great guy. So go buy Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950 (Harvard, 2009).

Defending What (Ideally) Need Not be Defended

In The Chronicle Review Douglas Little reminds us why we need diplomatic history. He's preaching to the choir not only with me but with a goodly portion of dcat's readers. Nonetheless his is a message that needs to get out to a broad audience. We need more diplomatic history, and more military history, and more traditional political history. Not at the expense of much of the good work going on in the historical profession, but rather to strengthen and augment and provide context for that work.

From Colony to Superpower

In this Sunday's New York Times Book Review Josef Joffe reviews George Herring's ambitious contribution to the Oxford History of the United States, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776. Joffe concludes that while Herring's synthesis is not perfect, "We have long been waiting for a single-volume history like this one, and “From Colony to Superpower” deserves a place on the bookshelf, if only for sheer effort and sweep."