ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historiography of race and gender in diplomacy. It explains the evolution of diplomatic historians’ use of race and gender as concepts, lenses, and analytical tools. Marilyn B. Young, raised in Brooklyn and energized by the emergent women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, pioneered this approach. Young’s work began with the study of late-nineteenth-century Chinese Open Door policy and moved, by the mid-1960s, to interpret the politics of US expansionism and foreign intervention through the lens of feminism. Von Eschen demonstrated further the potential of reading cultural diplomacy in the context of race in another classic: Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, published in 2004. Sport scholars have also taken pains to chronicle the costs, for Black athletes, of demanding an anticolonial, transnational liberation politics. Scholars of early-twentieth-century American empire also produced inventive reflections on gender, race, and power.
