Profiles in Courage is a 1956 volume of short biographies describing acts of bravery and integrity by eight United States senators. The book profiles senators who defied the opinions of their party and constituents to do what they felt was right and suffered severe criticism and losses in popularity as a result. It begins with a quote from Edmund Burke on the courage of the English statesman Charles James Fox, in his 1783 attack upon the tyranny of the East India Company in the House of Commons, and focuses on mid-19th-century antebellum America and the efforts of senators to delay the American Civil War. Profiles in Courage was widely celebrated and became a bestseller. It includes a foreword by Allan Nevins.
Why England Slept (1940) is the published version of a thesis written by John F. Kennedy in his senior year at Harvard College. Its title is an allusion to Winston Churchill's 1938 book While England Slept, which also examined the buildup of German power. Kennedy's book examines the failures of the British government to take steps to prevent World War II and its initial lack of response to Adolf Hitler's threats of war.
Paul Mus (1902–1969) was a French writer and scholar. His studies focused on Viet Nam and other South-East Asian cultures.
David Hackett Fischer is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Fischer's major works have covered topics ranging from large macroeconomic and cultural trends to narrative histories of significant events to explorations of historiography.
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) was founded in order to "promote excellence in research and teaching of American foreign relations history and to facilitate professional collaboration among scholars and students in this field around the world." It has nearly 1,200 members in over forty countries. It hosts an annual conference, and publishes the quarterly Diplomatic History. It also publishes a triennial newsletter, Passport. SHAFR has increasingly fostered connections with international historians and organizations.
Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston University in 2004 and previously taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Oxford University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 as well as other awards for scholarship and teaching.
The Cornell University Department of History is an academic department in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University that focuses on the study of history. Founded in 1868, it is one of Cornell's original departments and has been a center for the development of professional historical research institutions in the United States, including the American Historical Association and the American Historical Review. It remains a highly-ranked program in the field and its alumni and faculty have won Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, among other distinctions. In addition, many of Cornell's presidents have served among its ranks.
The Arthur Ross Book Award is a politics-related literary award.
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 is a 2003 biography of the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy (JFK), who was assassinated in 1963. It was written by Bancroft Prize-winning historian Robert Dallek, a prominent History professor at Boston University. The author is a presidential historian who taught at Columbia University and UCLA prior to accepting his professorial role in Boston, and was the author of nearly two-dozen books. Dallek researched JFK for five years, using National Security Archives, oral histories, White House tapes, and medical records in his preparations. Dallek contends that historians have underestimated JFK's achievements, especially in regards to his impressive accomplishments in foreign policy, including his averting nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis and his early steps towards detente with the Soviet Union, which began with his Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of August 5, 1963.
Elizabeth Kopelman Borgwardt is an American historian, and lawyer.
Marilyn B. Young was a historian of American foreign relations and professor of history at New York University.
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam is a 2012 book by the Cornell University historian Fredrik Logevall, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History. It also won the inaugural American Library in Paris Book Award and the 2013 Arthur Ross Book Award and was a runner-up for the Cundill Prize. The book covers the Vietnam conflict right from the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference till 1959, when the first American soldiers are killed in an ambush near Saigon in Vietnam, focusing on the Indochina War between France and the Viet Minh.
National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 (NSAM-263) was a national security directive approved on 11 October 1963 by United States President John F. Kennedy. The NSAM approved recommendations by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor. McNamara and Taylor's recommendations included an appraisal that "great progress" was being made in the Vietnam War against Viet Cong insurgents, that 1,000 military personnel could be withdrawn from South Vietnam by the end of 1963, and that a "major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965." The U.S. at this time had more than 16,000 military personnel in South Vietnam.
Elizabeth Cobbs is an American historian, commentator and author of nine books including three novels, a history textbook and five non-fiction works. She retired from Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A&M University(2015-2023), following upon a four-decade career in California where she began working for the Center for Women’s Studies and Services as a teenager. She writes on the subjects of feminism and human rights, and the history of U.S. foreign relations. She is known for advancing the controversial theory that the United States is not an empire, challenging a common scholarly assumption. She asserts instead that the federal government has played the role of “umpire” at home and abroad since 1776.
This bibliography of John F. Kennedy is a list of published works about John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States.
Barbara J. Keys is a historian of U.S. and international history and professor of history at Durham University. She was born in Albany, New York, and grew up in San Francisco. She served as the 2019 president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Mary Elise Sarotte is a post-Cold War historian. She is the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, which is part of Johns Hopkins University.
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, (1917–1956) is a 2020 biography written by Pulitzer prize-winning author Fredrik Logevall. Released by Random House in September, 2020, the work examines the education, military service, and political career of an American president who had acquired a great deal of his knowledge of International Relations in his early years. According to Logevall, it was Kennedy's knowledge of international relations gained in his youth that allowed him to steer the nation through the perilous deadlocks, short-term victories and failures of the Cold War. These included his disastrous attempt to thwart Castro's communist takeover of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and the more positively received resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy's brief Presidency was also noted for expediting the early stages of military détente with the Soviet Union by the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August of 1963 and its enactment in October of that year. Logevall observed that Kennedy's awareness of the imperialistic nature of Russia during the cold war and his wariness of the nature of Communist expansionism later influenced his goals as President to keep America first in diplomacy, improve ties with foreign countries in the Americas, and to keep America first in scientific and military technology. This focus led Kennedy to later establish the Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress with Latin America, and the continuation of the Apollo program with the goal of landing a man on the Moon before 1970.
Thomas Alan Schwartz is an American historian. He is the Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Political Science and European Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a biographer of Henry Kissinger, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John J. McCloy.
Gary J. Bass is an American author and academic. He is a professor of politics and international relations at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University.
