An Online Talk with John Dickson
Retired Foreign Service Officer & Author of the New Book

History Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations

Thursday, September 9 at 7pm EDT

Online via Zoom | Free & Open to All
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For over twenty-five years John Dickson served the United States as a Foreign Service officer in North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In History Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations (University Press of Kansas; 2021) Dickson offers valuable insights into the daily life of a Foreign Service officer and the work of representing the United States. In it he discusses a country-by-country series of lively personal experiences coupled with compelling historical analysis of the ways in which his inadequate understanding of the host country’s history, particularly its prior history with the United States, combined with his lack of knowledge of his own nation’s history lead to history shock: where dramatically different interpretations of history blocked diplomatic understanding and cooperation.

John Dickson offers these “stories with a history” to highlight the interaction between history and foreign relations and to underscore the costs of not knowing the history of our partners and adversaries, much less our own. In particular, in both Mexico and Canada our lack of knowledge and understanding of our long history of military interventions continues to complicate our efforts at developing mutually beneficial relationships with our two closest neighbors. In Nigeria and South Africa, Dickson experienced firsthand how the history of racism in the United States plays out on a world stage and clouds our ability to effectively work with key African nations. Perhaps the starkest example of history shock, of two nations with deeply conflicted views of their own histories and their shared history, is another country near at hand, Cuba. Not all of the gaps are too wide for bridge building; in Peru, Dickson provides an example of how history can be deployed to mutual advantage.

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