Dear Dr. Hoyt,
I hope I have reached the right person. I am one of the current editors of the journalDiplomatic History, and we are trying to reach all the authors who published in the journal's inaugural year.If so, I hope you'll accept this invitation below.
It is nearly the 40thanniversary of the first volume ofDiplomatic History. Nick Cullather and I want to celebrate this occasion by featuring some reminiscences by those who, like you, published in the journal during its inaugural year. We are asking for each author from the first year to write something brief about what it was like to participate in beginning a journal, or to be a diplomatic historian in 1977, or what the journal meant at the time or possibly in your career since, although we’d most like to evoke 1977. We are hoping to learn stories that perhaps have gone untold.
/ Hoyt’s Response:“Confessions of an Ex-Historian”
It was easy to decide on history as a graduate school path in the 1960s—the Kennedy years, the Cold War, and the baby boomers.It was almost as easy to choose diplomatic history as a specialization—with the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War.China begged, too, for attention.These factors, plus an outstanding undergraduate history teacher, led me to the University of Wisconsin, where I pursued a Ph.D. initially under the left-leaning (but, as I eventually came to conclude, right-thinking) William Appleman Williams.The dissertation, “Americans in China and the Formulation of American Policy,” was to be the centerpiece of my career, but what was not “easy” was finding a harbor professionally.
Instead, I became like Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” taking a series of temporary positions and remaining on the fringes of the profession, teaching, writing, (one article was reprinted20 years later) and rubbing shoulders with other diplomatic historians who are still good friends.Ironically, the publication inDiplomatic Historycame just as I exited from history into business, a move necessitated through bad timing, economy, luck, or, perhaps, lack of talent.
Having spent four years in business, then earning an MBA, I morphed from historian into a business faculty member at Illinois Wesleyan University, where my background in history still shows.I have remained fascinated with China, which by happy coincidence, has become a business as well as a history topic that I emphasize in my International business class.I’ve developed a passable spoken Chinese, In perhaps 20 trips there, with and without students, I have learned more about the people and places I wrote about, including Lansing Hoyt of the Yangtze Rapid Steamship Company (subject of theDiplomatic Historyarticle), and now understand why Americans wanted to stay there—and why they couldn’t.My philatelic interests, too, reflect that long-ago training in history; I’ve written fairly extensively on the foreign post offices in China, and have defined imperialism as the ability to issue stamps for use in another country with pictures of your heroes—certainly the case with the Washington-Franklin series used in the American post office in Shanghai until abolished during the Washington Conference.My training perhaps gives me a different perspective than many others in business—history nourished my natural curiosity, reflected in a wide ranging senior strategy class that looks at organizations and the people in them, partly through the lens of changes over time.
But the past has been prologue to a very different future than I would have thought in 1977.When I made the transition, detailed inReflections on Life in Higher Education,[1]that part of my life became history.
[1]“You Should Have Been Here Last Week: The Fishing was Great,”inReflections on Life in Higher Education,ed. Rick Saucier (London, England: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015)