THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Thanks to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria for pointing out a NYTimes article in the expanding category of “academic history under siege,” this time about diplomatic rather than military history.  This does have at least a little bit of quantification (one of my perennial complaints) behind it, with regard to the proportion of departments who have a diplomatic historian on staff.  There’s a slight problem in these figures with shifting self-identification, including a number of people who would traditionally have been called diplomatic historians who for a number of reasons reject the label, in favor of international history or something else.  I’m not thrilled with “diplomatic” only because the journal Diplomatic History is so closely identified with American history that it’s tough for someone focusing on Europe to feel entirely at home.  I have some hunches, but they’ll have to wait until I get my hands on a AHA guide to history departments.

My chief concern lies elsewhere.  The article quotes Thomas Zeiler, echoing a similar claim by Victor Davis Hanson, as saying that fewer refereed articles are published in diplomatic history than before.

What is the empirical basis for that claim?  If we go back to the alleged good old days, maybe the 1950s or 1960s, you had Diplomatic History, more or less exclusively focused on American diplomacy.  You didn’t have the International History Review (thirty years old), Diplomacy and Statecraft (twenty years old), Cold War History
and Journal of Cold War Studies (both about ten years old).  Each is primarily devoted to publishing diplomatic history.  So where exactly is the fall in publication?

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