Making history the second world war achievements

Such inquiry was also facilitated by the growing inclination of governments to publish edited collections of diplomatic correspondence to justify their foreign policies to a broader (and newly enfranchised) public. At a time when developments in philosophy and politics combined to make the rise of the modern European nation-state seem the central drama of the age, it was natural that statecraft and war should occupy centre stage in historical writing. The classical diplomatic history of the later 19th and early 20th centuries was hallmarked by assiduous attention to the archival record and an interpretive focus on the foreign policies of the great powers, the making and breaking of treaties, and the deliberations and actions of foreign office clerks, diplomats and statesmen. Mingling traditional and innovative approaches, this is a vibrant area of historical inquiry, albeit with a dynamism that engenders a lack of consensus over what should constitute its core concerns. This expansive evolution has continued with each successive generation and at the cutting edge of the sub-discipline today scholars are plying cultural modes of analysis and emphasising non-state actors and transnational processes in ways which in turn call into question the adequacy of the descriptor international. Thus in the 1960s and 1970s diplomatic history mutated into a specialism predominantly denoted as international history.

Although formal relations between states remained central, more systematic attention began to be paid not only to diplomacy, but also to economics, strategy, the domestic sources of foreign policy, ideology and propaganda, and intelligence. After the Second World War, diplomatic historians gradually developed a more expansive view of their subject matter. The study of political and diplomatic relations between nation states was central to the discipline of history as it was professionalised and institutionalised in the 19th century.( 1) As the discipline expanded and diversified, the study of statecraft became the preserve of a discrete sub-field known as diplomatic history.

Making history the second world war achievements