A Historian's Diary, 1935 - 1980
Author: Gordon A. Craig
Editors: Edward Kehler and Bruce Thompson
Co-Publishers: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship and Stanford Historical Society
Date of Publication: 2023
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.