Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations at Forty

Gary Hess

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) was established at a time when diplomatic history was very much at the center of the study of U.S. history. Spurred by the expansion of higher education in the l960s and by the imperative of the cold war struggle, departments in many colleges and universities added specialists in the field.  The rise of New Left scholarship and the debate over the origins of the cold war gave a certain urgency to the historical perspective of America's place in the world. This was accentuated by the intense controversies stirred by the Vietnam War, which further contributed to burgeoning enrollments in diplomatic history courses.

In that atmosphere, Professor Joseph P. O'Grady of La Salle College in Philadelphia and Professor Alexander De Conde of University of California-Santa Barbara took the initiative in bringing together some eighty diplomatic historians including several senior scholars, who had expressed interest in discussing the need for a professional society. Convened during the 1967 Organization of American Historians annual meeting in Chicago, this group agreed to the establishment of SHAFR. The name of the organization was important, underlining a redefinition of the field to include all aspects of American interaction with the world and breaking from the inaccurate but widespread connotation of "diplomatic history" as a narrow and exclusively archival-based discipline (the "what one clerk in the state department said to another clerk" characterization).

Instrumental in giving SHAFR credibility within the profession and in advancing its agenda was the leadership of senior diplomatic historians. The early presidents were among the "giants" in the field: Thomas Bailey was the first and was followed by DeConde, Richard Leopold, Robert Ferrell, Norman Graebner, Wayne Cole, Bradford Perkins, Armin Rappaport, Robert Divine, Ray Esthus, and Akira Iriye.

At its launching, SHAFR had a relatively modest agenda. Governed by an elected president and council with an appointed executive secretary-treasurer, it planned to hold sessions and social gatherings in conjunction with the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians.  That soon changed, as SHAFR took a number of initiatives that addressed the concerns of its members. The first step was the establishment in 1969 of a Newsletter (renamed Passport in 2003), which quickly became an important source of information on official business as well as research-in-progress, recently-completed dissertations, essays on archival research opportunities, and forums on major books that challenge traditional interpretations. For instance, recent issues have included forums featuring extended commentaries by several scholars on Gareth Porter's Perils of Dominance and Victoria de Grazia's Irresistible Empire.

Of enduring significance in SHAFR's early development was the extraordinary generosity of Dr. Gerald and Myrna Bernath, who were instrumental in supporting the work of younger scholars. They were committed to honoring the memory of their late son, Stuart L. Bernath, who died of bone cancer in 1970 at the age of thirty-one. That same year his dissertation, Squall Across the Atlantic: American Civil War Prize Cases and Diplomacy (which had been directed by DeConde) was published to critical acclaim in 1970 by the University of California Press. Between l972 and l976, the Bernaths established three awards for younger scholars: the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, the Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize, and the Stuart L. Bernath Scholarly Article Prize. Later the Bernaths also funded the Stuart L. Bernath Dissertation Grant and two prizes in honor of Myrna Bernath which encourage and recognize the scholarship of women historians: the Myrna F. Bernath Fellowship Award and the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award.  A final legacy of the Bernaths is the subsidization of student memberships.

The Bernaths' commitment to fostering the careers of younger scholars established a tradition that is reflected in a number of other prizes that have been established over the last two decades, including the Michael J. Hogan Fellowship to promote research in foreign languages; the W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship; the Samuel Flagg Bemis Research Grant for doctoral research; the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize; the Lawrence Gelfand-Armin Rappaport Fellowship for dissertation research travel; the Georgetown Travel Grant, also to support dissertation research. (Three prizes recognize established scholars: the Norman and Laura Graebner Award for lifetime achievement; the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize; the Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize for Documentary Editing.)

In 1975, SHAFR decided to hold summer meetings, which at first were modest and dependent on adequate numbers of participants in the early years for meeting in the Washington, D.C. area (thus facilitating combining travel to the conference with research in the National Archives) and on inviting other groups, such as the American Military Institute, to sponsor joint sessions. As the organization has grown, SHAFR continues the tradition of meeting in the Washington D.C. area, doing so now in alternate years; recent conferences outside the beltway have been at the University of Texas in 2004 and the University of Kansas in 2006; the 2008 meeting will be at The Ohio State University. At the 2007 Conference in Chantilly, Virginia, 375 persons attended and participated in fifty-four panels; attracting considerable media attention was a luncheon address by General Michael V. Hayden, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which outlined plans for the declassification of documents pertaining to the Agency's covert operations.

The decision to launch a journal was the most significant step in SHAFR's development and the most contentious one. Proponents, mostly younger scholars, argued that a journal would enhance SHAFR's stature and would encourage scholarship. On the other side, many members predicted that a journal would make it more difficult for members to publish in the mainstream journals and questioned whether the scholarly output of diplomatic historians would yield sufficient articles of quality. Proponents responded that the relative paucity of articles on U.S. foreign relations appearing in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Pacific Historical Review and other journals was not indicative of scholarly productivity as much as it was a result of the difficulty of competing with other areas of specialization, particularly at a time when social history was in its ascendancy. After considerable discussion, the SHAFR Council approved plans to launch Diplomatic History. A contract was secured with Scholarly Resources of Wilmington, Delaware, and Armin Rappaport at the University of California-San Diego agreed to become editor, with the first issue appearing in 1977. Under a series of far-sighted editors, including Warren Cohen of Michigan State University, George C. Herring of the University of Kentucky, Michael J. Hogan then of The Ohio State University, and currently Robert Schulzinger of the University of Colorado -- Diplomatic History, which is now published by Blackwell, has become one of the premiere journals in international relations. After twenty-five years as a quarterly publication, Diplomatic History in 2003 began publishing five issues annually.  As the editor explained, that expansion reflected the need to devote more space to well-received surveys of the literature and review essays. By 2006, the journal's circulation totaled 4,605, including 850 institutional subscriptions and 2,450 sites with Blackwell Synergy online access.

The SHAFR of 2007 surpasses the expectations of its founders of 1967. Membership hovered around six hundred during the 1970s, with only a handful of non-U.S. members, but it grew dramatically, especially overseas, in the following decade with membership in 1990 reaching 1,300. Today membership stands at 1,440 with thirty-three countries represented. The national office and the editorship of Passport, which earlier had been at separate institutions, have since 2003 been housed at The Ohio State University. That institution will, in the summer of 2008, sponsor SHAFR's first institute for college and university faculty and advanced graduate students on the topic "War and Foreign Policy: America's Conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq in Historical Perspective."

There is an irony in SHAFR's remarkable growth in that today scholars of American foreign relations sense that their field has become marginalized within the profession. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary, the editor of Diplomatic History invited former presidents to contribute their reflections on SHAFR's development. The fourteen presidents to do so spoke mostly of the excitement that surrounded the organization's founding and the ensuing growth and ventures, but a number spoke wistfully of the loss of the pre-eminence that diplomatic history enjoyed in the l960s and the sense that mainstream journals shied away from publishing scholarship in the field and that there are fewer panels on foreign relations at the AHA and OAH meetings. SHAFR itself has something to do with these developments, as members have increasingly looked to its meetings and its journal for presenting their research. Yet concerns run deeper and have been reflected in several presidential addresses and essays in Passport and Diplomatic History. To some members, the marginalization reflects a bias in a social history-dominated profession against political and diplomatic scholarship, while to others, it results from the reluctance of scholars of American foreign relations to incorporate new modes of historical inquiry and to cross disciplinary boundaries. Much recent research suggests that scholars are broadening the approach to the study of foreign relations. So future debates on the pages of Passport and Diplomatic History may well focus on whether that reorientation has been inadequate or has gone too far.