American Historians in War and Peace: Patriotism, Diplomacy and the Paris Peace Conference, 1918-1919

Description: In this study of the American historians who accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference in1919 Professor Neilson focuses on a development unique in its time(and now taken for granted) : for the first time a president used the expertise of professional scholars as the basis for far reaching decisions on the immediate issues of war and peace and European reconstruction as well as reconciliation. The study charts the period before American entry into the first World War(April,1917)when a number of historians, several fellow colleagues of former Professor Wilson at Princeton, helped mobilize pubic opinion in favor of intervention. They acted as partisans of the Allied side and with war and subsequent victory ,many wished to continue contributing their skills and energy to forging a new peace. Neilson ,using primary materials such as diaries, unpublished memoirs, position papers et al, investigates how the historians who went to Paris ere chosen and what