Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy

University of East Anglia

Monday, September 12, 2016  |  12:15-1:30 PM  |  SRH 3.122

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Worldmaking is a compelling new take on the history of American diplomacy. Rather than retelling the story of realism versus idealism, David Milne suggests that U.S. foreign policy has also been crucially divided between those who view statecraft as an art and those who believe it can aspire to the certainty of science.

A graduate of the LSE and the University of Cambridge, David Milne is a historian of U.S. foreign policy. His first monograph America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War was published in 2008 and reviewed to acclaim in over thirty outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The National Interest, Diplomatic History and the American Historical Review. In 2011 the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times journalist Stephen Glain named America’s Rasputin one of his five “must-read” books on American militarism for thebrowser.com.

Dr. Milne is also a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (NY: OUP, 2013). He was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University in 2003, a senior fellow at the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History in New York City in 2005, and a visiting fellow at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia in 2009. David has also secured funding from the Kennedy Library, the Johnson Library, the British Academy, and was awarded an AHRC Research Fellowship in 2011.

In addition to the above, David’s research has appeared in The Journal of Military History,Review of International Studies, International Affairs, the International Journal, and the Historical Journal. An admirer of Richard Hofstadter’s example as a public educator – a scholar who believed that historians must also engage with the present – David has also written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The New Statesman.