Keith L. NelsonProfessor, History Program in Global Peace and Conflict Studies (GPACES) |
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Research Interests |
American foreign relations; Soviet-American relations; war and society | |
| URL | www.hnet.uci.edu/history/faculty/nelson/ | |
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Research Abstract |
My research and writing have developed largely at the intersection of early interest in the European-American relationship with concern about the impact of war derived from teaching during America's Vietnam intervention. The traumas of the 1960's led many of us to reassess American ties with the rest of the world and, indeed, inspired some historians to investigate a largely neglected question: to what extent international conflict transforms the participating nations. Out of this inspiration grew a volume in which I attempted to deal comparatively with the effects of the world wars and the Cold War on our history. During the same period I examined American relations with Germany in an earlier post-war era, publishing a book which focused on the United States' role in the Rhineland occupation, 1918-1923. In addition I became intrigued with questions of theory as they impinge on foreign relations, and at the end of the 1970s Spencer Olin and I found our perspectives sufficiently similar to collaborate on a study designed to show how a person's life situation and values influence theoretical notions in writing the history of human conflict. I am currently pursuing my earlier concern with the impact of war by focusing on the early 1970s and American dealings with the USSR. In my most recent book, The Making of Detente, I show to what a great extent the process of relaxation with the Soviet Union was dependent on the after-effects of the tragic struggle in South-East Asia. Other factors were involved, of course, including the growth of military symmetry, the weakening of alliance systems, and the increasing economic difficulties of both superpowers, but it was the Vietnam conflict that destroyed our sense of inevitability about the Cold War. In a related study, The Foreign-Domestic Nexus, a number of collaborators and I will attempt to generalize about the way in which foreign affairs have impinged upon domestic matters in the last half-century and vice versa. |
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| Publications |
The Impact of War on American Life: The Twentieth-Century Experience (1971) |
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Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918-1923 (1975) |
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Why War? Ideology, Theory, and History (1979) with Spencer C. Olin, Jr. |
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The Making of Detente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam (1995) |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2773 | |
| Last updated | 02/25/2002 | |