This volume of essays concludes a project that began a dozen years ago, when I became the editor of Diplomatic History, the Journal of record for specialists in the history of American foreign relations. That project grew out of the conviction that such a Journal should inform its readers of the recent literature and newest trends in the field. With this conviction as a guide, I began to solicit and publish a variety of methodological and historiographical articles. The methodological articles, which elaborated the new conceptual approaches used by diplomatic historians, were later reprinted in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, a collection that I co-edited with Thomas G. Paterson in 1991. Four years later I edited a second collection of articles drawn largely from the same Journal and published as America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941. As the title indicates, the essays in this volume reviewed the recent literature on American diplomacy in the period from World War II through the Cold War. This period had so captured the attention of diplomatic historians that the volume included nineteen essays running more than six hundred pages. But even while preparing America in the World I was already recruiting and Publishing historiographical reviews of the literature on American foreign relations from the early Republic to the Second World War - more than a hundred and fifty years of diplomacy that had been slighted but not completely ignored by historians. The result was eight essays first published in Diplomatie History and now revised and republished in this volume.

As I noted at the Start of America in the World, historiographical essays are extremely difficult to write, but immensely rewarding. Even when they do little more than summarize the literature, they still perform an invaluable Service to scholars and students who find it difficult to stay abreast of their field. This is perhaps even more the case with the essays in this volume, if only because the diplomacy of the early Republic, of the nineteenth Century in general, and even of the period between 1900 and 1941 has long been a subject that most historians teach rather than research.