Diplomatic History (journal)

• 1. Introduction

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  Diplomatic History, the journal, was born in 1977 as a dedicated home for scholars studying how the United States has engaged with the world. Before it existed, historians of American foreign relations had no single flagship publication to call their own. That changed when the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations launched the journal under its founding editor, Armin Rappaport of the University of California, San Diego. What makes a scholarly journal survive and grow across nearly five decades? Who decides which questions about American power, war, and diplomacy deserve rigorous examination? And how does a publication pass its identity from one editorial team to the next without losing its purpose? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A Journal Finds Its Home

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  Rappaport guided the journal through its first years, from 1977 to 1979, before Warren I. Cohen of Michigan State University took over as editor in 1980. The early years were modest in infrastructure. A Paul S. Holbo served briefly as interim editor, and Judith W. Smith contributed as associate editor at San Diego, suggesting the journal leaned heavily on the University of California network in its founding phase. Cohen's tenure stabilized that foundation. George C. Herring of the University of Kentucky then led the journal through the mid-1980s, with Robert Seager II serving as his associate editor at the same institution. Herring was a respected scholar of American involvement in Vietnam, and his presence signaled the journal's seriousness about the most contested chapters of twentieth-century American foreign policy. The journal's first publisher was Scholarly Resources, which held the contract from 1977 through 1995.

• 3. The Hogan Era

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  Michael J. Hogan of Ohio State University took the editorial helm in 1987 and held it for an unusually long run through 2001. His associate editors rotated across that span: Jeffrey P. Kimball and David S. McLellan, both from Miami University, served from 1987 to 1990. William O. Walker III of Ohio Wesleyan University followed from 1991 to 1992. Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss, both at Ohio State, then served together from 1991 all the way to 2001, overlapping with the final decade of Hogan's tenure. That decade-plus of shared editorial work between Hahn and Heiss at the same institution as the editor gave the journal a concentrated scholarly identity. The fourteen-year span under Hogan is the longest single-editor run in the journal's recorded history. During this period, in 1995, the publisher changed from Scholarly Resources to Blackwell.

• 4. Colorado and Continuity

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  Robert D. Schulzinger of the University of Colorado, Boulder, became editor-in-chief in 2002, and his colleague Thomas W. Zeiler joined as executive editor the same year. They ran the journal together through 2012. Nathan J. Citino of Colorado State University served as associate editor across that same decade, giving the Colorado region an unusual concentration of editorial authority. When Schulzinger stepped back, Zeiler moved into the editor role for 2013 and 2014, with Kenneth A. Osgood of the Colorado School of Mines joining as associate editor. That transition from Schulzinger to Zeiler within the same Colorado network kept institutional memory intact. In 2013, Oxford University Press took over as publisher, ending Wiley's brief tenure from 2009 to 2012 and bringing the journal into one of the most prominent academic publishing houses in the world.

• 5. The Journal Today

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  Nick Cullather of Indiana University served as editor from 2015 to 2019. Anne Foster of Indiana State University began her editorial role in 2015 alongside Cullather and has continued as co-editor-in-chief through the present. Petra Goedde of Temple University joined as co-editor in 2020, and Alan McPherson, also at Temple, serves as associate editor. The journal now publishes five issues per year. Its 2020 impact factor, as reported by the Journal Citation Reports, stood at 0.529, a metric that places it within the specialized readership of serious academic history. Foster's tenure now spans more than a decade, making her the longest-serving current editor and one of the longest in the journal's history. The geographic spread of the current editorial team, from Indiana to Philadelphia, marks a departure from the earlier periods when a single university often anchored the operation.