{"title":"Of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Correspondents","authors":"Sam Lebovic","doi":"10.1017/mah.2023.62","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"If the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, what are we to make of the recent flurry of popular histories about foreign correspondents? In 2021, with You Don't Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker told us “How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” in Vietnam, and Judith Mackrell gave us the stories of “Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II” in The Correspondents.1 The year before, Nancy Cott, the pioneering scholar of U.S. gender history, explored the intertwined biographies of interwar journalists Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, Rayna Raphaelson, and John Gunther in Fighting Words.2 And then, in 2022, Deborah Cohen, an acclaimed historian of British and European cultural politics, subbed the relatively obscure Raphaelson out of Cott's quartet and added in H. R. Knickerbocker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning European correspondent in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial.3 (Cohen also elevates the role of Frances Gunther, John's wife, who suffered from crippling writer's block but was perhaps the most interesting thinker of the bunch.) When two leading, accomplished historians at the height of their games write essentially the same book, you know that something is in the air. So what era's eclipse are these works marking?","PeriodicalId":36673,"journal":{"name":"Modern American History","volume":"39 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Modern American History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2023.62","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
If the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, what are we to make of the recent flurry of popular histories about foreign correspondents? In 2021, with You Don't Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker told us “How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” in Vietnam, and Judith Mackrell gave us the stories of “Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II” in The Correspondents.1 The year before, Nancy Cott, the pioneering scholar of U.S. gender history, explored the intertwined biographies of interwar journalists Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, Rayna Raphaelson, and John Gunther in Fighting Words.2 And then, in 2022, Deborah Cohen, an acclaimed historian of British and European cultural politics, subbed the relatively obscure Raphaelson out of Cott's quartet and added in H. R. Knickerbocker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning European correspondent in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial.3 (Cohen also elevates the role of Frances Gunther, John's wife, who suffered from crippling writer's block but was perhaps the most interesting thinker of the bunch.) When two leading, accomplished historians at the height of their games write essentially the same book, you know that something is in the air. So what era's eclipse are these works marking?
如果密涅瓦的猫头鹰只在黄昏时飞翔,那么我们又该如何看待最近流行的关于外国记者的历史呢?2021 年,伊丽莎白-贝克尔(Elizabeth Becker)在《你不属于这里》(You Don't Belong Here)一书中向我们讲述了 "三位女性如何改写战争的故事"(How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War),朱迪斯-麦克雷尔(Judith Mackrell)在《通讯员》(The Correspondents)一书中向我们讲述了 "二战前线的六位女作家"(Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II)。随后,在 2022 年,著名的英国和欧洲文化政治历史学家德博拉-科恩(Deborah Cohen)将相对默默无闻的拉斐尔逊从科特的四重奏中移出,并在《帝国饭店的最后一通电话》(Last Call at the Hotel Imperial)中加入了普利策奖得主、驻欧洲记者 H. R. Knickerbocker3(科恩还提升了约翰-冈瑟的妻子弗朗西丝-冈瑟的地位,她患有严重的写作障碍,但也许是这群人中最有趣的思想家)。当两位处于巅峰时期、成就卓著的历史学家撰写了基本相同的著作时,你就知道其中必有蹊跷。那么,这些作品标志着哪个时代的衰落呢?