Acknowledgments

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Organizations, International || Personal Web Pages, Diplomatic Historians

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Many people have told me that the U.S. Diplomatic History Resources Index is a great service for historians, political scientists, journalists, and students at various stages of study. I hope so. This Index is an effort to create a central clearinghouse of information on the World Wide Web about U.S. foreign policy and its history. I think this is an important task. In the information age the organization of data is going to be just as important as the easy creation and transmission of this information.

This site, however, would not exist without the yeoman work and technical assistance of two friends. Robert Marr, then an undergraduate at UCLA, helped me create this site (plus a couple of others) back in May and June of 1996. Mike Burns, an old friend going back to our days as Boy Scouts, has helped me maintain this site since that time, making it even bigger and more useful. My sincere thanks to both of them.

Some people might be wondering about the reason behind the change in location. Establishing the site on a new server--and a new URL address--became a necessity following my graduation from the University of Southern California in May, 1997.  Fortunately, I found employment in the Department of History at Texas A&M--Commerce as an assistant professor, and was able to move the index over to the A&M--Commerce server in November, 1997.  Service should continue uninterrupted.

******************* Nearly ten years have passed since I created this web site as an "all-but-dissertation" graduate student.  In the years since the U.S. Diplomatic History Resources Index has grown in size and focus. After I had finished creating a personal web site of my own that included a copy of my viate, one of my roommates asked me how I was going to get people to look at it.  That comment made me stop and think.  My initial response was to create a web site that listed the web pages of other diplomatic historians.  At the time, just before the internet/computer craze of the late 1990s, not many scholars had their own web sites.  As I created the U.S. Diplomatic Historians' Web Pages Index--which I have since incorpoated into this Index as a sub-page--I started to realize that there was a lot more material out there that was useful and relevant to diplomatic historians, and from my experiences working at the Library of Congress, I knew that organizing information was almost as having the information itself.  When these ideas connected, this Index was born.  In 1996 the Index was just one long web page, but over the years I have created a number of sub-pages that focus on subject groupings like academic journals and scholarly publications.  The growth of the Index also reflects the growth of the profession.  Originally the focus was quite narrow, focusing only on issues related to U.S. policy towards other nation-states.  Now, the site includes links to the national archives of other countries and the web sites of non-state actors like the International Olympic Committee.

The Index has also gotten a lot of attention.  Media outlets as diverse Fox News and The Washington Post have reviewed it in positive terms.  There are other ways to measure its importance.  The Index is the second site that comes up on a Google search using the term "diplomatic history," behind only the web site for the academic journal Diplomatic History.  Since Google ranks these web sites according to the number of visits these sites recieve, I feel that this ranking is a reflection of the utility of this web site to the study of U.S. foreign policy history.

NES
Los Angeles, CA
Austin, TX
Commerce, TX

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