Beyond Truman

This study draws on the life of renowned historian, Robert H. Ferrell, to explore issues related to the history profession. Ferrell’s life story contextualizes postmodernism, the New Left, and the challenges of crafting history. The author analyzes Ferrell’s biases, examining distinctions between his morals and actions as well as his private and public life. This book provides crucial insight into the subjectivity of history, the boundaries of the discipline, and the effects of historians’ social lives on their work.

Douglas A. Dixon provides a fine and full portrait of historian Robert H. Ferrell, among the most distinguished interpreters of American diplomacy writing during the American century. More than a study of a man or a school, this study assays the political and intellectual changes of an entire profession in the decades that followed the great postwar boom., Thanks to this study, Robert H. Ferrell—arguably Indiana University’s best-known and best-loved professor of History—now figures into a historical narrative of his own. Douglas A. Dixon’s research portrays Ferrell—the scholar and the man—as something more than the “giant of diplomatic history” or the “Truman biographer,” presenting him, instead, as a distinct individual, both a product and a shaper of a fascinating period in American intellectual life.

Douglas A. Dixon earned his PhD at the University of Georgia.