A Historian's Diary, 1935-1980 by Gordon A Craig

A Historian's Diary, 1935-1980 by Gordon A Craig

Gordon A. Craig (1913-2005) was for more than half a century one of America's foremost historians of modern Germany and Europe. He was the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and, in 1982, the president of the American Historical Association. A prolific scholar and legendary teacher at Princeton and then at Stanford, he was also one of the twentieth-century's great diarists, beginning in 1935 as a student touring Hitler's Germany and continuing to record his observations and reflections about international relations, scholarly projects, university affairs, and daily life through the end of the twentieth century. This selection of entries from his diary includes his experiences as a student in Germany and at Oxford, his wartime service in the State Department and the United States Marine Corps, his rise to prominence as a scholar and teacher at Princeton, his role in Stanford's transformation into one of the world's leading research universities during the 1960s and 1970s, and his experiences as a visiting scholar and teacher at the Free University of Berlin during that same period.

Gordon A.Craig was a historian of German and diplomatic history who was Scottish-American. Before serving in the US Marine Corps during World War II, he studied history at Princeton and was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He coedited the 1941 book Creators of Modern Strategy: Military Thinking from Machiavelli to Hitler, which served as a strategic thinking guide for military leaders during World War Two. The Germans, The Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-1945, Europe Since 1914, The End of Prussia, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Issues of Our Time, and Politics and Culture in Modern Germany are only a few of Craig's other works. Craig was unique in that he saw history as a human discipline rather than a social science, and he sought to integrate the study of history with the study of literature. In 2005, Gordon A.Craig passed away.