Beyond Truman. Douglas A. Dixon
on French edition organ music” nor the Baedeker guide books so useful to inform a tourist of the historic significance of sites investigated, along with general books on architecture.80 Young Bob planned to take future tours to Fountainbleau and Versailles conducted by the Red Cross. Sightseeing in Luxemburg and Germany came only months after the Germans surrendered.
Given Ferrell’s embrace of world travel and history, it is hardly remarkable that he would later find himself a leading historian of American foreign relations. What is remarkable, with dominant stories of the Second World War conflict, is the ease with which soldier-cum-tourist Ferrell traveled through destinations in the Middle East, North Africa, the British Isles, and Europe from 1943 through the V-E Day. What, of course, one reads in the Second World War stories during Ferrell’s jaunts to “parts unknown” is hardly that of this Sergeant’s account.81 While the Allies were attacking Italian forces along the peninsula off the Mediterranean Sea, this Army chaplain’s clerk interrogated the landscape and cultures of North Africa. During the Battle of the Bulge, he whisked around celebrated sites in the United Kingdom. As Hitler’s forces made their last-ditch push into Belgium and northeast France, Ferrell found it convenient, even if a little chilly, to take in the world’s art masterpieces and architecture in and around Paris, seemingly untouched by the bloody casualties of the Second World War narratives. Though a lowly enlistee, this is quite a story, one missing from mainstream accounts.
NOTES
1. Letters to Charles Blankenship, July 8, 2006 and January 25, 2003 (in possession of Charles Blankenship, San Marcos, Texas); letter from Robert Maddox to Botzenhart, November 19, 1973; letter to Richard S. Kirkendall, February 26, 1973; letter to David S. McKellan, May 20, 1973; letter to Margery M. McKinney, July 23, 1973; letter to Holsti, September 1, 1973, Box 41, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Gregory M. Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World: In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 277. Into the twenty-first century, see Richard S. Kirkendall (ed.), Harry’s Farewell: Interpreting and Teaching the Truman Presidency (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004); Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and Cold War Revisionists (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006).
2. Index Card, Robert Ferrell’s evaluation of candidates for the David D. Lloyd Prize associated with the Harry S. Truman Library; Ferrell wrote that Bruce Kuklick’s entry American Policy and the Division of Germany is “revisionist” and “for that reason alone we really cannot give it the prize” (circa May–June 1974), Box 48.
3. Ferrell, The Review of Politics 36, no. 2 (April 1974), 323–326, Box 179.
4. AHA Newsletter, “Professor Schlesinger Replies,” circa 1963–1964, Box 41.
5. Robert H. Ferrell, “Pearl Harbor and the Revisionists,” The Historian 17, no. 2 (Spring 1955), 215–233; letter to George Brinkle, April 14, 1974; Robert H. Ferrell, “The Revisionist Historians,” symposium paper, April 1974, Box 41.
6. Ferrell, “Pearl Harbor and the Revisionists,” 215–233.
7. Callum G. Brown, Postmodernism for Historians (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3–6; Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 103–l09; see Mark Donnelly and Claire Norton, Doing History (New York: Routledge, 2011), for the multiple purposes of history in the ancient world and beyond, Chapter 2; Howell and Prevenier, From Reliable Sources, 14–15.
8. Ferrell details many of the arguments put forth against these revisionists in Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, esp. Chapter One. The overlap is remarkable (given the dates the two were published) if one compares this account to Ferrell’s Pearl Harbor and the Revisionists,” 215–233.
9. Brown, Postmodernism, 27.
10. Ibid., 26–29.
11. Jonathan Dewald, “Rethinking the 1 Percent: The Failure of the Nobility in Old Regime France,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (June 2019), 910–932.
12. For two well-documented studies discussing interdisciplinary history, see David S. Landes and Charles Tilly (eds.) History as a Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971); H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
13. Letter to Stephen Kertesz, June 23, 1953, Box 44.
14. Letter to Ferrell from Stephen Kertesz, July 3, 1953, Box 44.
15. On Maddox and Handlin, see David S. Brown, Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 143–144.
16. For an excellent overview of this period, controversy, and context, see Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 18–37.
17. Interview with Robert H. Ferrell, conducted by Elizabeth Glenn, transcript p. 42, November 3, 1994, Indiana University Oral History Research Center, Bloomington, Indiana (hereafter IUOralHistory).
18. Brown, Postmodernism; Donnelly and Norton, Doing History, 5.
19. Brown, Postmodernism, 6–31.
20. Interview with Robert H. Ferrell, by Glenn, 42, IUOralHistory.
21. Interview with Robert H. Ferrell, conducted by Steven Sheehan, February 13, 1998, IUOralHistory; Theodore A. Wilson, “Introduction: Individuals, Narratives, and Diplomatic History,” in Presidents, Diplomats, and Other Mortals: Essays Honoring Robert H. Ferrell, ed. J. Garry Clifford and Theodore A. Wilson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 3–11.
22. Interview with Robert H. Ferrell, Sheehan, transcript p. 3. IUOralHistory.
23. History 103, December 6, 1940, Box 74.
24. Robert H. Ferrell BGSU grade card sheet, semesters January 25, June 10 and August 9 (all 1940), Box 74.
25. Letter to Ralph McDonald, January 10, 1952, Box 44.
26. Letter to Sumner Canary, January 17, 1966, Box 7.
27. See transcripts and note discrepancy in Ferrell’s telling (e.g., minor in English and German) and letter to Mom and Dad (hereafter M/D), August 15, 1943, Box 74.
28. Letter to Robert C. Gallagher, September 19, 1952, Box 44.
29. Letter to Philip E Mosely, January 27, 1957, Box 43.
30. Note contrary evidence on “enlistment” draft board letter, in letter to Ferrell from H. A. Siphen (Chairman, Selective Service System, Local Board #23, Lucas County, Ohio), Box 74.
31. Interview with Robert H. Ferrell, by Sheehan, 3, IUOralHistory.
32. Letter to M/D, July 16, 1943, Box 74.
33. Letter to M/D, August 15, 1943, Box 74.
34. Letter to D. Gregory Badger (Field Executive, BSA, Cleveland), January 15, 1938, Box 74.
35. Letter to M/D, January 8, 1945, Box 74.
36. Letter to Sunderlin, April 28, 1951, Box 84 (among others to Sanderlin, May 9, 1979, August 16, 2001); letter to M/D, circa late July 1945 Box 74.
37. “The Key 1946,” BGSU Key Yearbooks, Book 20 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, 1946), 30.
38. Letter to Robert Gallagher, September 19, 1952, Box 44.
39. Ferrell, GRE (Graduate Record Exam), May 10, 1947, Box 84.
40. Ernest Ferrell Sr., Stories I Want My Grandchildren to Know (Columbus, OH: author, 1980), 69.
41. Interview with Robert H. Ferrell, by Sheenan, 3, IUOralHistory.
42. Ferrell Sr., Stories, 72.
43. Interview with Robert H. Ferrell, by Sheehan, 3, IUOralHistory.
44. “150 Additional Awards,” The American Magazine 128, no. 3 (September 1939), 70.
45. The American Magazine