Welcome to H-Diplo

Welcome to H-DIPLO, the H-NET discussion list dedicated to the study ofdiplomatic and international history. You have joined a community of 4,600 scholars that spans the globe. The list also has an editorial board composed of distinguished scholars in the field.

H-Diplo Home Page: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/

For information on managing your subscriptions to H-Diplo and other H-Net lists, please consult Appendix One (at the end of these Guidelines).

H-DIPLO's Editorial Board:

Tom Blanton, National Security Archive

Kathleen Burk, University College London

Malcolm Byrne, National Security Archive

Diane Clemens, University of California, Berkeley

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, San Diego State University

Robert Hanks, Wilfrid Laurier University

Hope M. Harrison, George Washington University

Jim Hershberg, George Washington University

William Keylor, Boston University

Diane N. Labrosse, H-Diplo Fellow, National Security Archive

Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University

Thomas Maddux, California State University, Northridge

Sally Marks, Providence, R.I.

Chester Pach, Ohio University

Bradford Perkins, University of Michigan

Priscilla M. Roberts, University of Hong Kong

David Schoenbaum, University of Iowa

Yone Sugita, Osaka University

Janice Terry, Eastern Michigan University

Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina Emeritus

Odd Arne Westad, London School of Economics and Norwegian Nobel Institute

Thomas Zeiler, University of Colorado

EDITORIAL BOARD EMERITUS

Robert Beisner
Michael Hogan
John Lewis Gaddis
Bradford Perkins

MANAGING EDITOR

Diane Labrosse is the National Security Archive H-Diplo Fellow.

LIST OPERATIONS (the H-Diplo discussion network)

Diane Labrosse and Christopher Ball (Iowa State University) are H-Diplo's List Editors. They moderate all messages submitted to the H-Diplo discussion network/listserv for posting. For list-related correspondence, including relevant announcements, please e-mail h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu in plain-text format and please do not use attachments, which our mail system cannot accept. Announcements can also be sent to H-Net Announcements.

WEB EDITOR (website operations and electronic projects)

George Fujii (University of California, Santa Barbara)

ROUNDTABLES (ROUNDTABLE REVIEWS)

Thomas Maddux (California State University, Northridge) Diane Labrosse (National Security Archive H-Diplo Fellow) George Fujii (University of California, Santa Barbara)

BOOK REVIEWS

Christopher Ball (Iowa State University) is the H-Diplo Book Review Editor. Information for publishers is located on the H-Net Book Reviews website.

ESSAYS AND REVIEW ESSAYS EDITORS

Diane Labrosse, National Security Archive H-Diplo Fellow

ARTICLE REVIEWS (incorporating H-Diplo Article Commentaries)

Diane Labrosse and George Fujii (University of California, Santa Barbara) are the H-Diplo Article Review General Editors. They are responsible for the overall direction and coordination of the H-Diplo Article Reviews program.

Professor Thomas Maddux (California State University, Northridge), who also organizes most of H-Diplo's roundtable reviews, is H-Diplo Article Review Editor for Journal of Cold War Studies articles.

Professor Antoine Capet (Université de Rouen) is H-Diplo Review Editor for Special Projects.

Professor Campbell Craig (University of Southampton) and Professor Jonathan Reed Winkler (Wright State University) are H-Diplo Article Review Editors for Cold War history topics.

Dr. Jessica Chapman (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Professor Edwin Martini [e-mail link] (Western Michigan University) are H-Diplo Article Review Editors for Vietnamese and Vietnam War topics.

Dr. Rob K. Hanks, Wilfred Laurier University, is H-Diplo Review Editor on the topic of the Origins, Conduct, and Consequences of the First World War.

Dr. Matt J. Schumann [e-mail link] (Eastern Michigan University) is H-Diplo Article Review Editor for pre-Napoleonic scholarship.

Erin Black, University of Toronto, is an H-Diplo Article Review Editor.

Yafeng Xia (Long Island University) Review Editor for 20th Century Chinese History

INTERNATIONAL HISTORY SPOTLIGHT (IHS) EDITORS

William Glenn Gray, Purdue University
David R. Stone, Kansas State University
Diane Labrosse, National Security Archive H-Diplo Fellow George Fujii, University of California, Santa Barbara

JOURNAL PREVIEW EDITORS

Scott Rausch (North Seattle Community College), a former H-Diplo list editor, and Erin Black (University of Toronto).

H-DIPLO is completely non-partisan. List moderators will review all submissions and reserve the right to reject flames, irrelevant material, or items that do not further scholarly dialogue. Moderators, in turn, are monitored by the list editors and the editorial board. A current set of our guidelines can be found at the end of this message.

Established in mid-1993, our list is relatively young and still evolving. Thus, we eagerly solicit any comments you might have (now or at any time during your subscription) concerning shortcomings you see in the list or suggestions for new features we might add.

This welcome message is designed to provide you with basic information about this network. It contains information on using the list (managing your subscription; tips on contacting and communicating via the list; mailing addresses of the list editors; a list of the current editorial board); rules for posting (style, editorial practice); information about the network's associated service on the World Wide Web; and contact information about the network's parent, H-Net.

I. The H-Diplo Network: Scope, Content, Purpose.

H-DIPLO is the H-NET discussion list dedicated to the study of diplomatic and international history. You have joined a community of scholars that spans the globe. The list also has an editorial board composed of distinguished scholars which determines broad policy.

We are glad to have you on-line. We hope that you will participate in our dialogue and that you will find H-DIPLO informative and useful.

II. Editors.

The editors serve two-year renewable terms, with the approval of the H-Net Executive Committee and rotate their duties. The current editor will be identified in all messages coming from the list. The editors will solicit postings (by email, phone and even by regular mail), will assist people in managing subscriptions and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. Anyone with suggestions about what H-Diplo can and might do is invited to send in ideas. The editors will solicit and post newsletter-type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions.) Like all H-Net lists, H-Diplo is moderated to edit out material that, in the editors' opinion, is not germane to the list, involves technical matters (such as subscription management requests), is inflammatory, or violates evolving, yet common, standards of Internet etiquette. Please read section III below for details about ownership, style, formatting, and content of your messages. H-Net's procedure for resolving disputes over list editorial practices is Article II, Section 2.20 of our bylaws, located at:

http://www.h-net.org/about/by-laws.html

III. Communicating Through the List.

A. Copyright notice. PLEASE READ CAREFULLY. H-Net considers all messages posted to its lists to be a form of publication. All contributions to H-Diplo fall under Art. II, Sec. 2.04 of the H-Net Bylaws concerning copyright and intellectual property:

"Although authors of messages to H-Net lists retain the copyright in those messages, sending a message to an H-Net list for posting will constitute permission to H-Net and its subscribers for electronic distribution and downloading for nonprofit educational purposes with proper attribution to the author, the originating list, and the date of original posting. Original messages to H-Net lists are not in the public domain, and may not be used for other than educational, nonprofit purposes without the permission of the copyright holder and notification to H-Net." In general, the author retains copyright rights to publication of any submission to the list, and grants to H-Diplo and H-Net permission to store, disseminate with full attribution, and make available to subscribers such submissions without further permission. Postings (such as H-Net reviews) that are commissioned by H-Net are copyrighted by H-Net and may be reprinted for nonprofit, educational purposes with proper attribution to the author, location, and H-Net. A full copy of the H-Net Constitution and Bylaws and other important information may be found on the World Wide Web at: http://www.h-net.org/about/.

B. Contributions: "Netiquette." The tone and content of H-Diplo depend directly on subscribers. The editors want to encourage lively, informal, productive discussion and exchange of information. To that end, we ask that contributions be considerate of the needs of a busy audience of scholars, many of whom must pay for their access to the internet. A number of excellent guides to online behavior and style are available on the World Wide Web; we invite you consult them.

-- ALL MAIL TO THE LIST MUST BE SIGNED. The editors will delay posting until authorship and email address are confirmed.

-- CONTENT: Editors retain the right to review material for its pertinence, tone, style, and relevance to the list's mission. Ad hominems, unattributed quotations or innuendo, private messages forwarded for posting without permission, or messages that violate the norms of civility and professional courtesy will be rejected. Persistent violators can be removed from the subscription list.

-- STYLE: the default editorial style for the list is that of a letter to the editor. Your remarks can be crafted to suit the tone of an existing discussion thread, but in any case they should address the editor and not make direct personal references to others, except where you are replying directly to a simple query (e.g., "you can find this information in Webster's Third International Dictionary."). Avoid excessive quotation of messages you refer or reply to.

-- FORMAT: Please send messages in plain text: no styles, html, special fonts, graphics files, or nonstandard characters (except diacriticals, which are acceptable). Signature files are subject to editing for content and length. Advertisements in signatures will be removed. Remove or turn off .vcf, digital signatures, or other automatic attachments. As a rule, editors do not redistribute attachments to the list; consider posting the material at a web site, or consult with the editor concerning proper venues for publication.

IV. Technical Information.

When you subscribe, LISTSERV will send you a confirmation message containing important information about managing your subscription. Please save this message as a text file for future reference. ALL changes to your subscription must be addressed to listserv@h-net.msu.edu, the software that manages the distribution and archiving of list electronic mail.

For online help with your subscription, visit: http://www.h-net.org/lists/help/

E-mail: help@mail.h-net.msu.edu

1.) To subscribe: Normally, receiving this message from listserv indicates that you are already subscribed to the list. But should you need to resubscribe, send the following command (turn off signatures, styles/fonts, and word wrap if you expect the line to wrap), as an email message to listserv@h-net.msu.edu:

sub H-Diplo your name, institution
Example: sub H-Diplo Jane Smith, Illinois State U.

Follow the instructions in the reply that LISTSERV will send you in response to this command.

2.) To unsubscribe, logon to the computer account from which you subscribed to the list, and send this message to listserv@h-net.msu.edu:

SIGNOFF H-Diplo

Please unsubscribe from H-Diplo and all other mailing lists if you are terminating a particular computer account. You can then resubscribe from the new account.

3.) To change your subscription address: if you have access to your old account, login to it and send the command:

CHANGE listname newaddress
E.g., CHANGE H-Diplo jsmith@ilstate.edu

You then must login to the NEW account to confirm the change, or it will not be executed. If you do not have access to your old account, then write to the list address and have an editor make the change for you; be sure to provide your old and new addresses.

4.) To send your own message to all subscribers, send an email note directly to H-Diplo@h-net.msu.edu. Please see III above on style and formatting of messages to the list.

5.) To REPLY to a message so that all subscribers can read it, be sure that the outgoing reply is directed to H-Diplo@h-net.msu.edu, and not to the original author or to the editor. Replies intended only for individual authors should be sent directly to the author.

6.) If you are away for an extended period, suspend H-Diplo email by sending this to listserv@h-net.msu.edu:

SET H-Diplo NOMAIL

7.) After vacation, you can resume by sending to listserv@h-net.msu.edu:

SET H-Diplo MAIL

8.) If you prefer to receive one daily digest of all posts to H-Diplo instead of various individual posts, you can do so by sending this to listserv@h-net.msu.edu:

SET H-Diplo DIGEST

To return to individual messages, send the following message:

SET H-Diplo NODIGEST

V. The H-Diplo Site on the World Wide Web

In addition to providing interactive communications via electronic mail, H-Diplo also maintains a site on the World Wide Web. The site is located on the H-Net server at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. It may be located by following the hypertext links at http://www.h-net.org.The H-Diplo web site contains the following information and services:

- The archives of the H-Diplo list, known as its "logs." They are in searchable and sortable format.

- The network's official documents: its welcome files, lists of board members and editors, contact information, and other founding and information documents.

- Hypertext links to resources in our subject: teaching materials, research archives, other lists.

V. Advisory Board.

H-Diplo's daily activities are managed by the editors. Its long-term policies are developed by the advisory board. If you are interested in serving on the board, please contact the current editor. Board members referee incoming articles, reviews, and teaching materials; establish basic subscription restrictions and policy; advise the editors on disputes among editors and subscribers; monitor the list and make active contributions to discussion; and serve as the subscribers' voice in H-Net affairs. You are encouraged to contact any or all of the editorial board members with ideas and concerns about H-Diplo.

The current H-Diplo Advisory Board can be viewed at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo

VI. H-DIPLO Guidelines

1. H-DIPLO is an electronic forum for discussing the history of international relations, broadly defined. It encourages scholarly exchanges on all aspects of this subject, regardless of the countries or periods involved. It particularly welcomes the exploration of new inter-disciplinary and methodological approaches, the evaluation of new archival sources, and contributions from scholars outside the United States.

2. H-DIPLO operates in the manner of scholarly journals, the program committees of professional organizations, or indeed anyone conducting a seminar which is to say that the editors and moderators reserve the right to keep the discussion on the subject, free from ad hominem attacks or other arguments that go beyond the limits of accepted professional discourse. The editors and moderators reserve the right to insist on certain basic standards of scholarship (such as providing adequate sourcing for controversial assertions of fact), to ensure that all posting further scholarly dialogue, and to keep the discussion on the subject.

3. H-DIPLO is non-partisan, and hence will not lend itself to specifically-targeted lobbying or other organizational efforts. It will runs information about the status of current controversies or policy debates that might affect the interests of our subscribers, though, and it welcomes frank and open discussions about their implications.

4. H-DIPLO does not run advertisements. It welcomes information about new books, new journals, new sources, fellowship and scholarship opportunities, proposed conferences, and - through H-NET -- job listings. But it will not run solicitations to purchase books, or to subscribe to journals, or to apply for admission to particular academic programs.

5. H-DIPLO will post book reviews it has commissioned through the H-NET book review project, and it will encourage discussion of these once they appear. The moderators will also, from time to time, post reviews forwarded from other lists if in their judgment these may be of interest to subscribers. H-DIPLO will not, however, post unsolicited book reviews.

6. H-DIPLO will post abstracts of articles appearing in scholarly journals or of papers presented at scholarly conferences, as well as items from other discussion lists, if in the judgment of the moderators these relate to subscribers' interests and are not of excessive length.

7. H-DIPLO will regularly post information about new discussion lists or other resources on the Internet that might be of interest.

8. H-DIPLO will not provide e-mail addresses beyond those listed on communications addressed to the list as a whole. The moderators will, however, refer subscribers to directories where such information is usually available. The use of e-mail addresses culled from the list for purposes of sending unsolicited mass mailings to members outside normal H-DIPLO channels ("spamming") is a violation of netiquette and an abuse of the list's resources, and may therefore be grounds for revoking a subscriber's membership to the list.

9. H-DIPLO welcomes requests for information from subscribers for whom standard reference sources have proven inadequate, but it discourages -- and may not run -- inquiries easily answerable from such sources. It encourages potential authors of theses and dissertations, as well as articles and books, to use its facilities as a way of determining who else may be working on particular topics; but the moderators ask those responding to such inquiries to consider whether their reply will be of general interest to everyone on the list, or might better be sent directly to the subscriber making the inquiry.

10. H-DIPLO seeks to promote discussion among as wide and diverse a group of its subscribers as care to participate. The editors and moderators recognize, though, that too many e-mail messages -- especially if they seem to come, repeatedly, from the same individuals -- can cause other subscribers to "tune out." Accordingly, the moderators may, from time to time, ask frequent contributors to delay, consolidate, or even withhold messages when the prospect of "overexposure" seems imminent. They will not apply this rule, though, where substantive exchanges on issues of broad interest are taking place.

11. H-DIPLO reserves the right to reject any subscriber's message that does not fall within the above guidelines, or to ask that it be modified to comport with them. In all such cases, the moderators will contact the contributor to explain why the message is being handled in the way that it is. The moderators will not always assume this obligation when non-subscribers forward messages originating on other lists. Because the moderators, even in the best of circumstances, devote enormous time and energy to their duties, they may at their discretion refer contributors to the Guidelines if they feel that the demands of responding in certain instances are excessive.

12. H-DIPLO has an appeal mechanism in case objections to these procedures arise. Moderators will first refer unresolved disputes to the editors. If the editors are unable to resolve them to the satisfaction of the subscriber in question, they will then refer the issue to the Editorial Board, whose collective decision will be final. Procedural disputes that come before the Board for resolution are considered matters of privacy and may not be divulged without the permission of everyone concerned. Even if permission is granted, H-DIPLO will not disseminate such information to the list in keeping with its mission as a forum purely for discussing the history of international relations.

13. In extreme cases, and solely in the interests of maintaining the list's standards, H-DIPLO reserves to right to revoke a subscriber's membership for gross or repeated violations of list guidelines.

14. H-DIPLO is still very much a "work in progress." Accordingly, the moderators, the editors, and the Editorial Board all strongly encourage suggestions from subscribers as to how the list might be improved.

VII. Our Parent Organization: H-Net

H-Net is an international consortium of scholars in the humanities and social sciences that creates and coordinates electronic networks, using a variety of media, and with a common objective of advancing humanities and social science teaching and research. H-Net was created to provide a positive, supportive, equalitarian environment for the friendly exchange of ideas and scholarly resources.

The goals of H-NET networks are to enable scholars to easily communicate current research and teaching interests; to discuss new approaches, methods and tools of analysis; to share information on electronic databases; and to test new ideas and share comments on the literature in their fields.

H-Net's Constitution and Bylaws, along with a list of its officers and committees, is available at: http://www.h-net.org/about/

Among H-Net's many services are:

- Book and software reviews: timely, exhaustive, authoritative, professional, fast. Mailed through our lists and stored in searchable, printable, retrievable format on our site at the World Wide Web. http://www.h-net.org/reviews

- Job guide postings: at regular intervals, H-Net offers employment information in a broad array of fields in the humanities and social sciences. http://www.matrix.msu.edu/jobs

- H-Net calendar: announcements of conferences, papers, and professional activities, archived and searchable at our web site. You can visit our site and sample these and other services, at: http://www.h-net.org/announce

CONTACTING H-NET FOR MORE INFORMATION

On the World Wide Web: http://www.h-net.org

Electronic mail: H-NET@H-NET.msu.edu

Postal mail:

H-Net
8A Morill Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, 48824-1046
Phone: (517)432-5134
Fax: (517)353-5229

Executive Director: Prof. Peter Knupfer
Michigan State University
E-Mail: peter@mail.h-net.msu.edu

Associate Director: Heather Hawley
Michigan State University
E-Mail: hawley@mail.h-net.msu.edu