Douglas A. Dixon provides a fine and full portrait of historian Robert H. Ferrell, among the most distinguished interpreters of American diplomacy writing during the American century. More than a study of a man or a school, this study assays the political and intellectual changes of an entire profession in the decades that followed the great postwar boom.

David Brown, Elizabethtown College

Thanks to this study, Robert H. Ferrell—arguably Indiana University’s best-known and best-loved professor of History—now figures into a historical narrative of his own. Douglas A. Dixon’s research portrays Ferrell—the scholar and the man—as something more than the “giant of diplomatic history” or the “Truman biographer,” presenting him, instead, as a distinct individual, both a product and a shaper of a fascinating period in American intellectual life.

Eric Sandweiss, Indiana University