Department of State Records Now Available Online: Despatches from Special Agents, Notes to Foreign Missions, and Notes from Foreign Consuls, 1789-1906

Today’s post was written by David Langbart, archivist in Textual Reference at the National Archives at College Park, MD.

The National Archives is pleased to announce that more records of the Department of State have been digitized and are now available online through the National Archives Catalog.  This is the third in a series of occasional posts.  The first post described the microfilm digitization project and the first foreign affairs records made available through it.  The second post is about consular despatches.

The Global Biography Working Group

PRESENTS

Greg Tomlin

History On-Line Presents:

Professor Mark Kramer 

The Department of History – Faculté des arts et des sciences de l’Université de Montréal is seeking to appoint a tenure-track assistant professor in History of the United States.

English

Please join us for a Washington History Seminar Panel with Mark Bradley and Mary Dudziak on Making the Forever War:  Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism.

AHA Perspectives on History on The Foreign Relations Series at 160 and on The 202 State Department HAC Report 

FEATURES

SHAFR Electronic Communications Editor

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) invites applications for a new position of Electronic Communications Editor, with a focus on social media and content on the SHAFR website. The Communications Editor will plan, execute, and evaluate a variety of virtual communications initiatives, projects, and platforms that strategically align with the broader advancement of SHAFR and the academic field (including development, member relations, and communications). This individual’s scope of work will span SHAFR’s social-media needs, including members, committees and task forces, Council, print publications, and the annual conference. The Electronic Communications Editor will develop an annual work plan, in consultation with the President and the Executive Director and for presentation to Council, and is evaluated against the success of that plan. This position will also work with an advisory committee (much like an editorial board) in order to ensure a variety of perspectives and approaches within the content presented on the website.

Berlin and the Cold War Symposium

Ohio University and the Contemporary History Institute will host a virtual symposium on Berlin during the Cold War on 1-2 October 2021. The event is free and open to the public and features nine leading scholars in Europe and the United States in the areas of diplomatic and military history. Panelists will examine a variety of aspects of Berlin from 1945 to 1989 to better understand the city’s role in the Cold War. Topics covered will be intra-alliance politics, policy and strategy, and cultural diplomacy.

Announcing Class of 2021-22 Doctoral and Military Fellows

The Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin welcomes its 2021-22 class of Doctoral and Military Fellows! Emily Whalen of the University of Texas and Alexandra Sukalo of Stanford University are this year’s postdoctoral fellows. Zoltan Feher of Tufts University and Elena Wicker of Georgetown University are this year’s predoctoral fellows. Lt. Col. Edward Arntson (U.S. Army) and Cdr. Mike Knickerbocker (U.S. Navy) will be our inaugural Military Fellows. William Chou of Ohio State University joins us as a postdoctoral America in the World Consortium fellow, and Joseph Ledford of the University of California, Berkeley joins us as a predoctoral America in the World Consortium fellow.

https://www.oah.org/awards/book-awards/willi-paul-adams-award/

DEADLINE: SUBMISSIONS MUST BE POSTMARKED BY MAY 2, 2022
Willi Paul Adams
The Willi Paul Adams Award is given biennially by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best book on American history published in a language other than English. The award (formerly the Foreign Language Book Prize) is named for Willi Paul Adams, who was an active member of OAH in Germany and a tireless advocate of the internationalization of American history.

The Department of State’s Advisory Committee for Historical Diplomatic Documentation will hold a virtual public meeting on August 30, 2021. The meeting, which will begin at 10 AM, will feature a presentation at 11:00 AM from the Office of the Historian’s Digital History Advisor, Joseph Wicentwoski. Dr. Wicentowski will discuss the origins and evolution of the Foreign Relations of the United States digital edition, how to make the most of the website's search capabilities, and how to access the FRUS open data corpus. This presentation will be of keen interest to those working in the field of digital humanities, historians of U.S. foreign relations, international historians, their students, and many others. This presentation will be of keen interest to those working in the field of digital humanities, historians of U.S. foreign relations, international historians, their students, and many others.

To attend, please RSVP via email to Julie Fort at [email protected]. Instructions on how to join the virtual meeting will be provided upon receipt of RSVP.

More Department of State Records Now Available Online: Consular Despatches, 1783-1906

SHAFR Manuscript Workshops for Contingent Faculty
Call for Applications

At its meeting in June, SHAFR Council approved a proposal to fund three manuscript workshops for contingent faculty who are members of SHAFR and work in the U.S. foreign relations field.  These workshops may be familiar to those who have benefited from them: established scholars read the work of others, often junior scholars’ revised dissertations, then meet together to discuss the work, with an eye toward preparing it for publication.  To this point, few foreign relations historians who do not have tenure-stream jobs or coveted post-doctoral fellowships have had access these sessions.  This program aims to remedy that.

Call for Papers
2022 SHAFR Conference

Virtual Sessions Online June 10-11, 2022
In-person sessions in New Orleans, LA, June 16-18, 2021

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) invites proposals for its 2022 annual conference. After the tremendous success of the 2021 virtual conference under difficult circumstances, SHAFR members expressed a strong desire to include virtual days in the 2022 conference. Thus, we are delighted to bring you the best of both worlds in 2022: two dynamic days of online offerings, followed by two and a half days of an in-person meeting. The SHAFR 2022 program will use the virtual sessions to bring what works best online to the widest audience possible, while maintaining in New Orleans the best features of face-to-face conferences. The Virtual Days will include plenary events, feature roundtables, and lightning rounds with brief (5–7 minute) presentations of exciting new research. In New Orleans, we will feature traditional panels and roundtables and plenty of time for making connections with other scholars.
 
Proposals for the 2022 conference can take three forms:

• Virtual: lightning-round paper proposals
• New Orleans: panel proposals
• New Orleans: individual paper proposals

 
SHAFR is dedicated to the study of the history of the United States in the world, broadly conceived. Given that the production, exercise, and understanding of U.S. power takes many forms and touches myriad subjects, the Program Committee welcomes proposals reflecting a broad range of approaches and topics.