Introduction: Rethinking U.S. World Power—Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations

In the 1990s, the subfield of U.S. diplomatic history faced a crisis. By the Cold War’s end, social and cultural history stood at the vanguard of the historical profession, especially within the discipline of American history, in which they were preeminent. In the wake of the rights revolutions of the 1960s, analysis of marginalized groups—Black Americans, women, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and workers, especially—swept the discipline of history, eclipsing the study of presidents, diplomats, members of Congress, and other actors upon which diplomatic historians—most of them white, cis, male, and oftentimes Ivy League educated—traditionally had focused. Furthermore, this novel emphasis on narrating history from the “bottom up” was accompanied by the adoption of new approaches, including but not limited to quantitative methods and oral histories, that seemed to make excursions to the National Archives to comb through State Department records less important than they had previously been. In this environment, many observers concluded that diplomatic history was out of step with the times.