-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Susan Pedersen, Back to the League of Nations, The American Historical Review, Volume 112, Issue 4, October 2007, Pages 1091–1117, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.4.1091
- Share Icon Share
Extract
For the two decades of its effective existence, the League of Nations was a favored subject of academic research. International lawyers, historians, and political scientists across the globe scrutinized and debated every aspect of its working; leading American scholars of the period—among them James Shotwell, Quincy Wright, and Raymond Leslie Buell—devoted much of their lives to investigating (and often to supporting) its ideals.1 The League's demise slowed that scholarly flow to a trickle.2 Although a number of its former officials wrote temperate assessments of its activities in preparation for the transition to the United Nations,3 most postwar accounts of the League were “decline and fall” narratives or analytical postmortems intended to reinforce “realist” analyses of international relations.4 Early studies of the League had been based largely on the institution's printed records; those chastened later accounts, by contrast, were written from diplomatic records and out of national archives. For thirty years, the archives of the League's own Geneva Secretariat were very little disturbed.