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A Non-Consular Accomplishment

Book cover image with stylized world map

My new US diplomatic history textbook is now out and available for adoption! It has primarily taken a long time to come to fruition because of all the work with the publishing company to create workable maps; I am very, very glad to be done with that process!

The book can stand alone as an interpretation of the history of the United States in the world to 1921, but it is designed to be one component of a more broadly conceived course. I chose to focus on issues of sovereignty and border construction in relations with Britain and Native Americans, with the idea that instructors would augment this narrative with their own work on other parts of the world and/or via student research projects. The book also contains the text of a half-dozen essential primary sources and more than eighty maps and images that can provide the basis for assignments and discussion.

The book is available on Amazon, but at this point buying directly from the publisher is cheaper, and that’s definitely where you want to start if you’re considering adopting the book for your course. I am also building a teaching-related site to support the book.

Publications and Other Distractions

I am pleased to announce that, in January 2020, my first article-length work on the US Consular Service was published in the volume Crossing Empires by Duke University Press. For more information and a pre-print, please visit the new “My Publications” page on this site.

My consular project has been somewhat on the back burner in the last couple of years as I have worked on two other significant projects.

One project is my lengthy (like, significantly longer than my first book!) annotated bibliography on “Expansion and Diplomacy after the Civil War, 1865-1914” that appears as part of The SHAFR Guide Online. Visit Brill for more information about the latest edition of this important US diplomatic history reference work. The next update is due out in 2021.

The other project is a US diplomatic history textbook for undergraduates titled Americans and International Affairs to 1921. It is due out with Cognella in time for Fall 2021 teaching–and perhaps for Spring 2020, if things move smoothly now that the manuscript is in press. At some point, someone else will be writing a second volume, but interested instructors might pair it with one of the existing textbooks focused on the post-1945 period. Fans of Walter LaFeber’s The American Age, which had its most recent edition in 1994 but is still in widespread use, should find much to like in my textbook.

UVM Humanities Center Fellows

I was fortunate to be a UVM Humanities Center Fellow in the 2019-20 academic year, receiving a reduction in my teaching load and an opportunity to engage with several other fellows as we each pursued research projects. In February 2020, we presented work-in-progress updates for the campus community at a “Research Salon.” (Turnout was excellent! Thanks to all who attended!)

I enjoyed this effort to explain the consular service and my interest in the development of the state and the human elements of bureaucracy to a general audience of UVM community members. My title was “Masters of 187 Forms: US Consular Officials and the Uneven Projection of US Sovereignty Abroad, 1856-1924,” and I used a hypothetical case study of a Canadian family arriving at the St. Catherines, Ontario consular agency in 1896 seeking the necessary paperwork for entry into the United States to illustrate some of the themes that are present in my larger project.

I also had some fun experimenting with “Smart Art” in PowerPoint…

The data here is from the 1896 Department of State Register, with my own assignment to one of the three consular systems I see in operation (informal empire, extraterritorial, major port) in the last line.

Into the Outward State

In late February 2019, I received a most welcome email from Prof. Holly Case of Brown University, who was exploring the possibility of putting together a day-long conference/workshop on consuls to be held … in May 2019. Those of you in US academia will know that this is an exceptionally short timeline for putting an event like this together. I was enthusiastic about participating, and so were many other people. It turned out to be a fantastic conference bringing together people working on a range of countries’ consular services, often with a particular interest in consular officials operating in the Ottoman Empire.

Here is the conference program:Download

My presentation, titled “Complicated, but Crucial … and Exceptional? Sovereignty and State Building in the US Consular Service,” was basically a brief summary of my chapter in Crossing Empires, showing the growth of the service over time and the post-Civil War expansion into the British Empire before offering my theory of three co-existing consular services, stressing the importance of consular activities to the functioning of the US government more broadly, and providing some comparative international data.

This is a basic visualization of my interpretation of the US Consular Service, with three systems in concurrent operation. At major ports, trade and travel was the emphasis, and any government could participate as equals if they played by the Europeans’ rules. In the extraterritorial system, Europeans and Americans operated their own legal systems on their hosts’ territory without extending reciprocal privileges; the Ottoman Empire and China are the main places in which this system operated. In the “informal empire” system, consular officials from a single country were the only consular officials present, and their efforts to promote their government’s interests could result in a weakening of European colonial ties or independent sovereignty in favor of closer ties with the consular official’s government.

AHA 2017: Making Digital History Work

At the American Historical Association conference held in Denver in January 2017, I participated in a panel on “Making Digital History Work,” which dealt with challenges of digital projects, especially outside of large-scale, well-funded collaborative projects. Our chair and commentator was Dr. Seth Denbo, the director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives for the AHA, and the other panelists were Dr. Konstantin Dierks of Indiana University, who spoke about the challenges for mid-career historians in learning the myriad skills required for digital projects, and Dr. Fred Gibbs of the University of New Mexico, who stressed the value of failure in constructing digital history projects and the importance of individuals understanding not only the historical content of their projects, but the technical aspects as well.

I showed this website as a form of digital history emphasizing process, small steps, and the value of iterative mapping. I also passed along six tips about building a dataset, based on my experiences to date:

Be prepared to start over. It’s probably better to use Excel than a database program, at least as first, as it is more flexible.

Keep a log or journal that reflects where your information has come from, the notes about the organization of your database (such as what your column headings mean), and where you have saved relevant files.

Use “save as” liberally so you can go back to earlier versions if you make a mistake or otherwise go down the wrong path.

Atomize your data and then concatenate as needed. It’s easier to put pieces of data together than it is to separate it.

If you’re using Excel and you’re unfamiliar with the “vertical lookup” function (VLOOKUP), you should learn that function.

Practice in other venues, like Zotero, iTunes, your grade book, or other administrative tasks. Doing so will help you get a sense of how data needs to be organized to achieve the desired ends.