US Military and Diplomatic History

A graduate seminar that treats US foreign relations as a historiographical problem rather than a timeline — you read the field's defining interpreters (May, Bailyn, LaFeber, Gaddis, Kennan, Lippmann) week by week from the colonial Atlantic through the Cold War and argue with them. The work is reading-heavy seminar discussion plus reports and a presentation, culminating in an original research paper and a final exam. It assumes you can already handle dense secondary literature, and it's where you learn to position your own argument inside ongoing debates about empire, war, and American power — the move from consuming history to producing it.