This website was originally meant to serve as a kind of supplement to my
book, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, February 1999). When it was launched in 1998, it
had three main parts, each of which is still included here:
(1) Appendices to A Constructed
Peace
(2) A discussion of declassification
analysis, one of the methods used in the book, together with some
illustrative documents (but a supplement, called “Declassification
Analysis: More Grist for the Mill,” containing over 40 documents in
multiple versions, was also posted in May 2013); and
(3) A practical
guide to doing Cold War history (last revised October 2004).
That guide, however, has effectively been replaced by two appendices to my
book The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006):
Appendix
I: Identifying the Scholarly Literature. This partly duplicates Part II of
the Cold War guide.
Appendix
II: Working with Primary Sources. This overlaps with Part III of the Cold
War guide.
Those two appendices were last updated in June 2021.
This site also contains some other material:
My curriculum
vitae (with links to texts of articles, reviews and unpublished
papers). Note especially the collection
of documents I accumulated when I was writing the Constructed Peace book. Those documents were pdf’d and
then ocr’d (so they’re all keyword searchable); the link is also included in the c.v.
listing for that book.
A collection of course
materials (including mp3s of my lectures, plus two videos—lectures by
Kenneth Walt and John Mearsheimer)
This whole website—the appendices to the Constructed Peace book,
the pdfs of all the documents I collected for that book, the two webpages on
declassification analysis, the two appendices to the methods book, my c.v.
(with outlinks, also archived, to practically everything I’ve written up
to this point), and a collection of course materials for various courses
I’ve taught (including tapes of lectures)—has been archived and
should be available, theoretically in perpetuity, through the Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/). Just type in the URL for this
website (http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/)
in the search field there, and if you select a capture for June 2021 or later,
you should be able to see everything in this website, even if UCLA is no longer
hosting it. The
“outlinks” cited not just on this page but on all the other pages
in the website have, in principle, also been automatically archived there. If a link doesn’t work, you can
search for the URL on the Wayback Machine and you should be able to find what
you’re looking for. This, of
course, doesn’t apply to links that don’t work because they’re
available through a subscription service;
in those cases you’d have to go through a library that is a
subscriber.
The only part of this website which I now plan to update from time to time
is the curriculum vitae, since it contains links to practically everything
I’ve written. I intend to add
and post additional writings as they’re written, and I’ll try to
make sure that those writings are also archived by the Internet Archive, so
that they won’t disappear entirely if UCLA ceases to host this website.