Andrew Kirkendall, a professor of History at Texas A&M, has just reviewed my April 2014 article “Putting the Canal on the Map” for the H-Diplo listserv. (PDF here.) I will self-servingly start with Dr. Kirkendall’s exceptionally kind introduction.
“It is not often that a journal article arrives in a scholar’s mail on a Monday, is read on Tuesday, and has its findings incorporated into a lecture on Wednesday. But it says something about my admiration for what Tom Long has accomplished here that this
was the case in my spring course on the history of inter-American relations.”
Wow! I think this might say more about Dr. Kirkendall’s dedication to keeping up with the literature and updating his syllabus than it does about my accomplisment, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Dr. Kirkendall does an excellent job of summarizing my piece. Even better, he follows up with some strong questions regarding on the question of agenda-setting, on the historical contingency of the mid-1970s, and generally about the ability of small states to effectively pursue their goals. Some of these questions I address a bit more in a longer chapter on Panama, which will be part of a forthcoming book. However, Dr. Kirkendall has given me more to think about while I work on revisions of that chapter, as well as on some theoretical pieces on small states in world politics.
The original article in Diplomatic History is available online.
Tom Long, PhD 