Blackwell Reference Online

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Research in the foreign relations of the early national era might be likened to a wellworked strip-mine, the first-comers having published such nearly definitive works from its documentary mother lode as to discourage any further digging by would-be prospectors. Whether it be a Samuel F. Bemis or a Richard B. Morris sorting out the multi-archival dimensions of diplomacy in Paris in the early 1780s, or a Dexter Perkins analyzing the circumstances that gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine forty years later, historians who came early to the scene appear to have left the late-comers panning for nuggets. Nor can the latter take heart from realizing that the careers of the major diplomatic players have already been chronicled by outstanding biographers. For all its apparent barrenness, however, the field is not without its opportunities; first, because the traditional lines of inquiry are still being nourished by the ongoing publication of the papers of the founding policymakers, but also because a new generation of historians has succeeded in coming up with new approaches and new analytical frameworks which, if they take hold, bid fair to broaden the very definition of foreign relations. For a look at such developments, the reader might begin with William Weeks' (1994) article in the scholarly journal Diplomatic History ; and for specific areas still in need of research, Bradford Perkins' ... log in or subscribe to read full text