For more than 225 years extraordinary men and women have represented the United States abroad. In 1996 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) and DACOR, an organization of foreign affairs professionals, created a book series to increase public knowledge and appreciation of American diplomats and their role in advancing our national interests. The books in this series demystify diplomacy by telling the story of American diplomats, the lives they led, and the world events they helped to shape.
Former ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh William B. Milam has produced a sympathetic, frank, and nuanced account of the two countries since their 1971 breakup. Published by Hurst & Co. of London and Columbia University Press, it is the 35th volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. This book...
Robert Hopkins Miller’s forty-year Foreign Service career, from 1951 to 1991, spanned virtually the entire Cold War. Miller worked on America’s unsuccessful Vietnam venture and its aftermath for nearly one-third of his career, and this account demonstrates his exceptional “hands-on” knowledge and his own critical evolution. The Vietnam War of...
No one likes nation-building. The public dismisses it. Politicians criticize it. The traditional military disdains it, and civilian agencies lack the blueprint necessary to make it work. Yet functioning states play a foundational role in international security and stability. Left unattended, ungoverned spaces can produce crises from migration to economic...
Philip Nash, Breaking Protocol: America’s First Female Ambassadors, 1933–1964 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020)––An extensive deep dive into the career journeys of six of the most influential early women diplomats. The State Department was a male-dominated entity, and women had a hard time making breakthroughs within it. Nash details the...
The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan is Ronald E. Neumann’s account of how the war in Afghanistan unfolded in the two years after he arrived in Kabul from Baghdad in July 2005 as the United States ambassador. A career diplomat, Ambassador Neumann brought to the job a lifetime’s professional...
Witness to a Changing World is the life story of David Dunlop Newsom, a Foreign Service officer who rose through the ranks from third secretary and vice consul in Karachi in 1948 to the top career post of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Carter administration. Along the...
In Uncle Sam in Barbary, Richard Parker tells the story of the young American republic’s first hostage crisis, and earliest encounter with Islam, which began in 1785 when Algerine corsairs–the Barbary pirates–captured two U.S. vessels off the coast of Portugal. The situation dragged on until 1796, when the United States paid...
Dick Parker was renowned in the State Department for his dry acerbic wit. From his early youth on U.S. Cavalry posts across the Southwest to his World War II experiences, through a successful Foreign Service career as a leading Arabist in the Near East, he observed and commented on everything.
In this autobiography...
This often surprising book shares firsthand accounts and frank discussions from a meeting held in October 1998 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Egypt and Syria’s attack on Israeli army positions in the Sinai and Golan. Twenty-five scholars and senior officials, former and current, searched for answers to persistent questions about...