The words “TARGET AMERICA” are handwritten across the top of a laminated map of the Western Hemisphere. Three concentric circles drawn on the map depict the potential ranges of ballistic missiles fired from Cuba. The outermost band encompasses nearly all the continental United States.
On a recent morning, 18 Yale undergraduates gathered inside the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library pondered the map, which is from the archives of Sherman Kent, a longtime Yale history professor who pioneered the CIA’s intelligence-analysis methods during his 17 years of Cold War service with the agency.
The students, who are enrolled in “Historical Approaches to Global Affairs,” an undergraduate seminar taught by historian David Engerman, viewed a variety of other archival records associated with the rise of the Nuclear Age in the Yale Library’s collections.
Students looked at maps from the archives of Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who served in U.S. Office of Strategic Services during World War II and the CIA during the first decades of the Cold War.
The course, Engerman says, aims to teach students how to formulate historical questions relevant to contemporary diplomatic and national security policies and provide them with the research skills to answer those questions as a professional historian would: by analyzing historical sources, including archival documents, published primary and secondary sources, and oral history.
This requires developing the ability to think like a historian, he said.
“My goal is to hone students’ skills at thinking historically,” said Engerman, the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of global affairs at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. “That means developing the ability to situate themselves in a historical moment and understand the world as it existed in that specific time. The best way to do that is through studying primary sources.”
Even encountering a carbon copy of a memo, something common to [Secretary of State Henry] Stimson that is completely unfamiliar to undergraduates today, helps transport you to the past.
For the course, each student is required to propose, research, and write a 12-to-15-page historical paper on a contemporary question about global affairs using primary sources. They document their progress in research journals, which they periodically share with Engerman and teaching fellow Henry Jacob, a history doctoral student in the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Transported to the past
During the session at the Beinecke, metal racks on either side of the classroom held boxes containing selections from the papers of several prominent individuals, including journalist John Hersey, whose book “Hiroshima” describes the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945; historian H. Stuart Hughes, who served as chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, better known as SANE, an advocacy organization founded in 1957 to promote nuclear disarmament; and Henry L. Stimson, who, as the U.S. secretary of war during World War II, oversaw the creation and use of the first atomic bombs.
“You can read Henry Stimson’s memoir and other books about him, but there’s something special about having access to his papers that helps place your mind in the specific period and context in which he was making decisions,” Engerman said. “Even encountering a carbon copy of a memo, something common to Stimson that is completely unfamiliar to undergraduates today, helps transport you to the past.”
Engerman consults with student Anna Chamberlin as she explores materials in the archive of journalist Hanson W. Baldwin, who covered the military extensively in his long career with The New York Times.
Anna Chamberlin, a senior, selected a box from the papers of Hanson W. Baldwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the U.S. military during a long career with The New York Times. In a folder, she discovered a document marked “confidential.” Dated Jan. 12, 1955, it was a digest of a discussion by the Council on Foreign Relations concerning nuclear weapons and foreign policy.
“They were discussing what might happen if a Soviet nuke hit New York City,” Chamberlin said. “It seems like an early assessment of, on a societal level, what measures could be taken to save the United States in the event of a nuclear war.”
She pointed to a section where it is suggested that, if the country’s petroleum-based economy and infrastructure collapsed after a nuclear strike, it would take 10 to 12 years to produce enough horses for families stripped of gas-powered machinery to become self-supporting in the most fertile sections of the country.
“It seems like they were letting their imaginations go as far as they could in considering what it would take to survive,” Chamberlin said. “It’s got my head going in a whole number of directions. It’s disconcerting to say the least.”
Students had an assortment of archival materials at their disposal.
A tremendous resource
Last fall, Yale faculty taught 239 class sessions with materials from across Yale Library’s special collections. Most of these were hosted in classrooms at the Beinecke Library or in the Gates Classroom in Sterling Memorial Library. Classes also take place at Haas Arts Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, the Divinity Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library.
Engerman class alone will visit the Beinecke five times this semester. During its first visit in early February, the students looked at archives belonging to figures from the World War I era, including Edward M. House, a diplomat and close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson. A visit in April will focus on Cold War legacies and feature the papers of Paul Bremer, who served as the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Two additional visits later in the semester relate directly to the students’ individual research projects.
David uses these sessions to convey that to do historians’ work, one needs to begin thinking about and understanding the archive.
In planning the Beinecke sessions, Engerman works closely with Bill Landis, a teaching and research services librarian at the Yale Library, and Joshua Cochran, the Beinecke’s curator for American history and diplomacy.
“What’s admirable about David’s teaching is not only the use and selection of materials to illustrate themes from the course and the readings he assigns, but also his emphasis on the essentialness of the archive for scholarly historical work,” Cochran said. “David uses these sessions to convey that to do historians’ work, one needs to begin thinking about and understanding the archive, the primary source material it houses, and the contexts in which it is kept, preserved, and made accessible.”
The students often worked in pairs as they waded through the archives.
For his part, Engerman appreciates the support he has received from Landis, Cochran, and other members of the library staff.
“Bill and Josh really feel like co-teachers,” he said. “They know the collections inside and out and are attuned to the kinds of materials that students will appreciate. They make it easy for faculty like me to teach with the collections, which are just a tremendous resource.”
During the most recent session at the Beinecke, students pored through letters John Hersey received from readers, records from the Manhattan Project medical group related to the first nuclear detonation test (known as the Trinity test) in the summer of 1945, and documents from the Coalition to Stop the Trident, an advocacy organization that sought to prevent the production and deployment of the Trident submarine-based nuclear weapons system during the 1980s.
Ahmed Khan, a senior, was reading a clipping of an article that Stimson penned for the February 1947 issue of Harper’s Magazine explaining his rationale for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The folder also included a condensed version of the piece that was published in Reader’s Digest.
“He’s describing the reasoning behind the White House’s decision to use the bomb and the nature in which the bomb was dropped,” Khan said. “He provides a lot of introspection into the tradeoffs, which is interesting.”
Bella Panico, a senior, went through a box of materials from the Manhattan Project Medical Group collection, which includes documents — some previously classified — about the group’s study of the medical implications of the Trinity test, which was conducted on July 16, 1945, in Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico.
The records, she said, were filled with geographical coordinates and notes about the timing of the nuclear test and where people involved would be located during the blast.
“Looking at the archives is fascinating,” she said. “You don’t think about it much, but all historical work comes from studying primary source documents like these. Historians interpret them and make sense of them. Without that, we would know so little about the past.”
