In spite of the title, this is not another essay about how badly read and provincial are American diplomatic historians; in fact, my temperature reading indicates a lot of good and interesting work out there. The title would have been unwieldy had I made my intent perfectly clear: This is an essay about how badly read and provincial are the keepers of the field – those who clean out the barnyard, get the cattle back into their cubbyholes, rake out the old, rake in the new, plant shoots, root out weeds, forecast crises and watersheds, sow discord, reap textbooks, pocket the rutabaga, and scold the rest of us for our lack of theory. My focus is on what is sometimes called “postrevisionism,” an odd season coming after the shimmering summer of orthodoxy and the dusky winter of heterodoxy.

Rather than recite the Farmer's Almanac of postrevisionism, however, after some initial observations I will focus on one textbook, on the work of one self-described postrevisionist and one postrevisionist in spite of himself, and finally, on a postrevisionism that I can recommend highly – even if it is not our solution, but still part of the problem. I offer my critique in the spirit of Carl Becker's radical idea that a professor's purpose is “to think otherwise.”

Orthodoxy and Revision: Perfect, Imperfect, or Pluperfect?

The most elemental act of “theory” is to name things: “x is y” might be the simplest summary of Heidegger's theme in What is Called Thinking.