My Four Sons--er, Books

​My fourth book, and the first book I have written myself, came out last month. I’m very proud of it. Its close examination of American power within the postwar Netherlands is something no other book has yet done, and this is what I value most about books. To me the best books reveal something fresh, uncover something hidden, say something true about the world that no one else has yet said, or in a way that no one else has yet said it. It’s not always the reason someone publishes a book, to be sure, but the saying of something new is usually the reason why readers cherish books. It’s that same spark of wondrous individuality and exceptionality that I associate with children.

​I have a son, but it is hard not to look at one’s books like a child in the world. They are often conceived in a flash of insight, gestated over a long period of hard work and high expectations, born into the world after a period of suffering, and then launched to readers in a career over which a parent has no control.
 
My first book, Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Johns Hopkins, 2013) came out of a conference I organized in 2009. I was discussing the Vietnam War and associated student protest with a group of Honors students, and one of them asked if I knew that a student protest had taken place at the University of South Carolina, where I was teaching. I had not known this. (He was a brilliant student, I must say.) Most of the protests with which we are familiar were northern (or western) affairs: Columbia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Berkeley, Kent State, and elsewhere. But there were protests at southern institutions as well, some of which were quite passionate.
 
Inspired by that student, I put together a conference to bring together scholarship on southern student activism. Former student activist heavyweights such as Chuck McDew, Tom Hayden, Connie Curry, Cleveland Sellers, and Tom Gardner came to address us. Our keynote speaker, Robby Cohen, an acknowledged expert on student activism, approached me later about collecting the papers from that conference into a volume. Rebellion in Black and White is not the first book to address student activism in the deep south; there had been a few others. But our book gathered together the leading scholarship and charted a future direction for research, and that was new. Hard not to be especially proud of your firstborn.

​My second book was likewise a product of serendipity (or an accident, if you prefer I stick to the metaphor). I got an email out of the blue from a Norwegian scholar of whom I had never heard. He had got wind of some of my work on US public diplomacy and European-American relations in the 1940s and 50s, and asked if anyone was working on the 1970s. This was a difficult period in US global hegemony, less like “present at the creation,” and more like “the beginning of the end” (or perhaps the first beginning of the end, followed fifty years later by the actual end of the end). So I proposed we put together a conference on US public diplomacy in the 1970s, and how US officials, and interlocutors at the receiving end, made and received propaganda about America in a very fraught period.
 
He said he had a few connections that might help us. Little did I know this meant connections with the US embassy in Oslo and the famed Norwegian Nobel Institute. We raised some money, planned a conference at the Nobel Institute, and issued our call for papers. More than 70 respondents answered the call! It was a difficult job to select the most promising of these, but we did, and along with a third co-editor (my books always seem to have a surfeit of parentage), convened our conference in Oslo. A volume of those papers followed a couple years later, Reasserting American in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of America’s Image Abroad (Manchester, 2015). I am proud of this book for several reasons, not least of which because it includes a paper from a student of mine. It is rare to have an undergraduate publish in a book of scholarship, but she made a signal contribution. (I have to be honest, though. Like more than a few middle children, I can never remember the full title of this book.)

​Having a bit of a track record, I was contacted in 2015 by a colleague at the University of Arkansas who was interested in exploring the legacy of Senator J. William Fulbright, a leading foreign policy thinker in the twentieth century, and a former president of the University of Arkansas. Again we formed a convening triumvirate and issued our call for papers. The resulting volume brought together original scholarship into the life and legacy of Fulbright himself, coupled with an equal number of chapters exploring the rich legacy of the prestigious exchange program that bears his name. The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology (Kentucky, 2019) took a year or two longer to complete than I anticipated, but like any respectable third child, that one had a mind of its own. There has been scholarship on Fulbright himself, including the wonderful biography by the distinguished historian Randall B. Woods. And the Fulbright program has been treated in scholarly articles. But there is no standard book-length history of the Fulbright program, and while our book doesn’t quite accomplish that feat, it does point in that direction for an enterprising young scholar to take up.

Throughout all this time I continued to work on my own book, American Power in the Netherlands. That birth, however, was a trauma all its own, and deserves its own post.
—David J. Snyder