TC 102 Part 1 Reading

• History teaches a certain skeptical mindset and the need to bridge the gap between scholarship and public policy.
• Historians should act responsibly with a clear sense of the limits of the possible.
• Historians must communicate their thinking to a wider audience to shape opinion and offer possible analogies with past patterns of behavior.
• The book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000" by Kennedy discusses the relationship between economic change and military conflict.
• States have both individual interests and shared interests with other states.
• The interaction between states, the causes of war, crisis management, and peace-making are the principal focus of international history.
• International history did not establish itself as the most important field in the historical profession
• Historians such as Webster, Lewis Namier, and Harold Temperley gained a deeper understanding of the importance of history through their involvement in intelligence and military matters during the war.
• Arms races have their own historical dynamic and can have significant political consequences.
• Historical scholarship cannot predict the future
• Later generations in Britain used the term "international history" to signify interest in broader historical patterns, including financial ties
• Pierre Renouvin and Egmont Zechlin were international historians who were maimed in World War I and represented French and German scholarship.
• Temperley acknowledged that G.M. Trevelyan's appointment meant the end of hopes for Modern and Diplomatic History on the Regius Chair
• Harold Temperley served in War Office intelligence and later became head of MI2E, dealing with the political side of problems of the peace settlement.
• International history has faced challenges and criticism, with contested methods
• Foreign policy is historically important and reveals the operations of the political system
• History is vulnerable to attempts to exploit it for present needs
• Post-modernity seeks to dissolve history and liberate from the coercive idea of reality and truth
• Perceptions of policy-makers can distort information and are decisive in decision-making.
• The external and domestic spheres of politics are inseparable.
• The dream of individual liberation has turned into a perpetual nightmare of a senseless and demystified present.
• International history needs to be understood in both international and national contexts.
• Ignoring the singularity of the past reduces it to a priori answers and fails to recognize its unique, irreversible, and unrepeatable nature.
• The aggressive foreign policy of the Electors of the Palatinate had internal, ideological, and religious roots.
• Policy-making is often ragged, haphazard, and inconsistent.
• Reducing grand narratives to decontextualized stories renders the differences caused by the passage of time insignificant.
• There is no guarantee that the public or politicians will listen to historical advice
• A generation is defined by a collective consciousness of common formative experiences.
• Considering the past merely a construct fails to appreciate the constructed nature of one's own thinking.
• There is a danger of self-indulgent reification in gendered approaches and in applying the idea of 'otherness' or 'alterity' to South Eastern Europe
• Diplomatic history is the study of the history of international relations through the documents of diplomats.
• Moscow's changing domestic priorities influenced inter-war Soviet foreign policy.
• Historians change the questions they ask of the past as they move away from the scene of action.
• Manipulations of history range from forgeries to lazy labelling and political activism
• Foreign ministries are knowledge-based organizations and political nerve centers.
• Collingwood's observation that the scholarly pursuit of history amounts to a 're-enactment of past experience' is pertinent here.
• It is necessary to study international history from a bilateral or multilateral perspective.
• Without relations with other states, the state cannot be an actual individual.
• Such experiential differences can be quite sharply developed, as shown in the work on the Islamic world and Jürgen Osterhammel.
• 'Versailles', 'Munich', 'Yalta' are constructed historical shorthands that imply collectively accepted 'lessons of the past'