{"id":205,"date":"2009-10-21T10:10:58","date_gmt":"2009-10-21T14:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/?page_id=205"},"modified":"2025-04-11T08:53:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T12:53:51","slug":"andrew-m-johnston","status":"publish","type":"cu_people","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/people\/andrew-m-johnston\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew M. Johnston"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My current research examines the crisis that afflicted the North Atlantic world\u2019s industrial-imperial societies at the beginning of the 20th century. The project began as a study of American progressive liberal internationalism before the First World War but has expanded into a comprehensive history of the diplomatic, economic, social, intellectual, and transnational filaments that crossed the North Atlantic in the generation before and during the war. It aims to understand how different nation-states responded to the internal fissures induced by the rise of industrial labour, women\u2019s activism, and new voices of colonial\/imperial resistance\u2014in short, calls for an expansion of the concept of humanity, self-determination, and human rights that destabilized the existing social order. The responses of these imperial states pointed, ultimately, toward the catastrophic war of 1914, but also past it, toward a world of liberal-capitalist governance through new institutional networks. In the short term, I am writing a history of the 1919 Zurich Congress of the Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom as a way of understanding how anti-national, dissenting organizations reassembled after the war and advanced a more radical critique of the intersection of national polities and international relations. The Zurich Congress articulated the idea that domestic human rights\u2014sexual, economic, racial\u2014were the only legitimate bases for a new international order. In this claim, they developed (often) uneasy ties with socialist and colonial agents as well. But the argument that, collectively, these groups advanced a new ontology of international relations rooted more explicitly in concepts of human equality can be traced in part to this struggle against war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a general sense, I have mostly been a historian of modern U.S. foreign relations, although the label itself is limiting. Having studied and written on NATO nuclear strategy in the 1950s, I belatedly came to the conclusion that much of what I had been doing as an international historian was barely scraping the surface. Understanding how states act on behalf of their nominal people involves, at the very least, an understanding of how such peoples are constituted historically as an identity, and how that sense of identity is postulated against a world of other identities. I was interested in George Herbert Mead\u2019s microsociological studies of the self and am thus inclined toward a broadly social understanding of nation-state interaction, which involves trying to look at the evolution of those agents who represent the state and those\u2014capital, religion, culture, ideas\u2014that often transcend it. All of this is to say, that I am deeply interested not only in history, but in the history of international relations theory, as well social and cultural theory, gender, race, imperialism, post-colonialism, the history and practice of Pragmatism, among others. I have also taught, from time to time, U.S. cultural and environmental history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Areas of research<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humanitarian intervention, human rights, power, and ideologies of \u201cthe human\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

United States history in a global context<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transnational history of the social sciences<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gender, international history, cosmopolitanism, imperialism, and liberalism<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pragmatism, feminism, and social theory<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A list of my current research projects can be found on my website: http:\/\/andrewjohnston9.wixsite.com\/mysite<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honours and Awards<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2022 Visiting Professor, John F. Kennedy Institute and Friedrich Meinecke Institute, Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2016 Favourite Faculty Award, Carleton Residence Community<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2013 Nominated for a Graduate Mentor Award, Carleton University<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2009 Nominated for TVOntario\u2019s \u201cBest Lecturer\u201d competition<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2006 Visiting Professor in American Studies, Seminar f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, Eberhard-Karls Universit\u00e4t T\u00fcbingen, T\u00fcbingen, Germany<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2003-2005 University Students\u2019 Council Teaching Honour Roll Certificate, University of Western Ontario<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2001 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Occasional Conference Grant<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1999-2003 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selected Publications<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2018The Whole Organism of Humanity\u2019: The Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom\u2019s Campaign for Women\u2019s Rights as Universal Rights, c. 1919,\u201d in in S\u00f6nke Kunkel, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, and Sebastian Jobs, eds., Visions of Humanity: Historical Cultural Practices since 1850<\/em>(New York: Berghahn Books, 2023).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Review of Jonathan Levy\u2019s Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States<\/em> (New York: Random House,2021), in Economic Sociology: Perspectives and Conversations<\/em>, vol. 24, no. 2 (March 2023): 36-38.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Review of Andrew Priest\u2019s Designs on Empire: America\u2019s Rise to Power in the Age of European Imperialism <\/em>(New York: Columbia University Press, 2021) in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review <\/em>(April 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew M. Johnston, Carly Cuifo, and Jenny Ellison, eds., Employing History: A Guide to Graduate School and Navigating the Job Market<\/em> (The Canadian Historical Association and the American Historical Association, 2020), 133 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Review of Tony Smith\u2019s Why Wilson matters?<\/em> The origin of American liberal internationalism and its crisis today<\/em> (Princeton University Press, 2017) in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review<\/em> (April 2018)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEmily Greene Balch,\u201d entry in Opposition to War: An Encyclopedia of United States Peace and Antiwar Movements <\/em>(ABC-Clio, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJulia Grace Wales,\u201d entry in Opposition to War: An Encyclopedia of United States Peace and Antiwar Movements <\/em>(ABC-Clio 201).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2019Despite Wars, Scholars Remain the Great Workers of the International\u2019: American Sociologists and French Sociology During the First World War,\u201d The Academic World in the Era of the Great War<\/em>, ed. by Marie-Eve Chagnon and Tomas Irish (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDwight Eisenhower as NATO commander,\u201d in Chester Pach, ed., A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower<\/em> (Blackwell, 2017)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Review of Andrew Johnstone, Against immediate evil: American internationalists and the four freedoms on the eve of World War II <\/em>(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014) in The Canadian Journal of History <\/em>51, 3 (2016): 637\u2013639.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJeanne Halbwachs, International Feminist Pacifism, and France\u2019s Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d\u2019\u00c9tudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre,\u201d Peace and Change <\/em>41, 1 (January 2016): 17-31.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Historiography of American Intervention in the First World War,\u201d Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review<\/em>, 45, 1 (April 2014): 22-29.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe disappearance of Emily G. Balch, Social Scientist,\u201d Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era <\/em>13, 2 (April 2014): 166-199.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Neoconservatives and Theodore Roosevelt,\u201d in Serge Ricard and Claire Delahaye, eds., The Heritage of Theodore Roosevelt <\/em>(Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSex and Gender on Roosevelt\u2019s America,\u201d in Serge Ricard, ed., A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt<\/em> (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2011): 112-134.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roundtable review of Shane Maddock, Nuclear Apartheid: the Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present <\/em>(UNC Press, 2010) in H-Diplo, January-February 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMead, Addams, Balch: Feminism, Pragmatism, and the Vicissitudes of Liberal Internationalism,\u201d in Claire Delahaye and Serge Ricard (eds.), La Grande Guerre et le combat f\u00e9ministe<\/em>. (Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 2009)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2018There must be two Americas\u2019: Obama\u2019s AfPak War and the Pathologies of Global Disorder,\u201d in \u201c\u2018We are going to stay long enough to set up their own institutions\u2019: Obama and the \u2018AfPak\u2019 Question,\u201d roundtable forum with Scott Lucas, Artemy Kalinovsky, Giles Scott-Smith, and Marilyn Young, in NeoAmericanist <\/em>4, 2 (summer 2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2019A functioning organism with its own voice\u2019: the Temporary Council Committee and the strategic origins of an Atlantic Community, 1951-1952,\u201d in Val\u00e9rie Aubourg, G\u00e9rard Bossuat and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Communaut\u00e9 europ\u00e9ene, communaut\u00e9 atlantique?<\/em> (Paris: Soleb, 2008)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hegemony and culture in the origins of NATO nuclear strategy, 1945-1954<\/em>. (New York: Palgrave- Macmillan Press, 2005)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2019Disembodied military planning\u2019: the construction of the Medium Term Defense Plan and the diplomacy of NATO conventional strategy, 1948-1950.\u201d Diplomacy and Statecraft<\/em>, vol. 12, no. 2 (June 2001), 185-230.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMr. Slessor goes to Washington: the influence of the British Global Strategy Paper on the Eisenhower New Look,\u201d Diplomatic History<\/em>, vol. 22, no. 3 (Summer 1998), 361-398.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent Conference and Colloquium Presentations<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenaer Gespr\u00e4che: <\/em>\u201cThe US in the Cold War at home and abroad,\u201d Discussant on a panel titled, \u201cMake Love Not War: U.S.-American Peace Efforts in the 1960s,\u201d Friedrich-Schiller-Universit\u00e4t Jena, July 1-2, 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnother Marshall Plan? Myths and Truths 75 Years Later.\u201d Participant in a panel (with Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Sergey Lagodinsky and Petra Pinzler) sponsored by the U.S. Embassy Berlin, the Cluster of Excellence SCRIPTS, and the Humboldt Lab of the Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t zu Berlin, Humboldt Forum, Berlin, June 10, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom, the First World War, and the Origins of \u2018Human Security\u2019\u201d, History Research Colloquium, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University of Berlin, May 16, 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBuilding Internationalist Norms in the 1920s: The Summer Schools of the Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom,\u201d for a panel entitled Liberal Internationalism as Practice: Conflicting Norms and Moralities in Constructing a New International Order in the 1920s,<\/em>Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Meeting, June 18-20, 2020, New Orleans, LA, USA (* The conference was cancelled because of the pandemic)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cZurich 1919: War, Peace, and the Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom\u2019s Feminist Critique of International Relations,\u201d The People\u2019s Conference: The Transnational Legacies of 1919. La conf\u00e9rence des peuples : les h\u00e9ritages transnationaux de 1919<\/em>, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston (Ontario), November 7-8 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Women\u2019s International League for Peace And Freedom\u2019s Feminist Critique of the League of Nations, 1919-1924,\u201d A Century of Internationalisms: the Promise and Legacies of the League of Nations<\/em>, 18-20, 2019, Lisbon, Portugal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2019A Little Child, Born of Dissipated Parents\u2019:\u2028The Women\u2019s International League for Peace And Freedom\u2019s Feminist Critique of the League of Nations, 1919-1924,\u201d Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Meeting, June 22, 2019, Arlington, Virginia, USA<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHuman rights, the Great War, and the Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom\u2019s critique of nationalism,\u201d Visions of Humanity: Culture and International History VI<\/em>, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut f\u00fcr Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin, 6-8 May 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cApathy, passive resistance and cynicism: Randolph Bourne\u2019s sociology of the liberal state,\u201d Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS) conference, Fredericton, New Brunswick, October 21-23, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJeanne Halbwachs and the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d\u2019\u00c9tudes documentaires et critiques sur la guerre,\u201d World War I: Dissent, Activism, and Transformation<\/em>, Georgian Court University, Lakewood, New Jersey, October 17-18, 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Theory and Practice of Gender in International History: What Transnational Feminists have Taught Us,\u201d at The Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, University of Toronto, Toronto, May 25, 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHenri Bergson and the Ontology of Diplomacy,\u201d for a panel entitled Ideas in Transit: Intellectual Exchanges as Foreign Relations at the Turn to the Twentieth Century<\/em>, at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Meeting, Lexington, Kentucky, 20 June 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAmerican Sociologists and International Sociology during the First World War,\u201d The Academic World in the Era of the Great War, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, organised by the Centre for War Studies at Trinity College and the Centre canadien des \u00e9tudes allemandes et europ\u00e9ennes at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, August 14-16, 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent Graduate Supervisions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mat Czipf (M.A. Thesis, 2020-2022), \u201cThe KKK and the World: A Quest for Friendship in a World Rejecting White Supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alex King (M.A. Thesis (Institute of Political Economy) 2020-2022)(With Prof. Melissa Haussman, Political Science), \u201cTrump\u2019s Unconventional Populism: A Historical Interrogation of Conservative Populism in the U.S. Using a Gramscian Interpretation of Common Sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adrian Harewood (MA), \u201cThe End of Respectability Politics: The United States Civil Rights Movement, Liberalism and The Vietnam War\u201d (2021)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Gravelle (MRE), \u201cSocial Media and the Internet as a Tool of Nationalism: the Ukrainian Case\u201d (2020)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carlie Visser (M.A., Institute of Political Economy) \u201cRe-examining Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Helen Gahagan Douglas, Gender, and New Deal Liberalism in the United States Senate Election in California, 1950\u201d (2018)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dany Guay-Belanger (MA) (with S. Graham), \u201cDeadplay: A Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Videogames as Cultural Heritage Artifacts\u201d (2018)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Teal (MA) (co-supervised with Alek Bennett), \u201c\u2019Cure is a matter of mind as well as body\u2019: Disabled Veterans And The Development Of International And Humanitarian Rehabilitation Activism.\u201d (2017)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Evan Sidebottom (MA), \u201cThe Man Who Could Go Either Way: The Many Faces of Cowboy Masculinity in 1950s American Film and Advertising.\u201d (2016)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lee Benson (MA) (with Prof. Jim Opp), \u201cDriving Nationalism: The Promotion of American Ideals and Identity in Automobile Film Advertisements 1930-1955.\u201d (2015)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tyler Sinclair (MA) (with Prof. John Walsh), \u201cSight Lines and Cross Flows: The Turn of the Century Planning of Philadelphia\u2019s Benjamin Franklin Parkway.\u201d (2014)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guy Massie (MA), \u201cMasculinity, Science, and the Mastery of Primitive Spaces in Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1930.\u201d (2014)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alana Toulin (MA), \u201cPure Food, Better Lives: Morality and Authenticity in the Promotion of Pure Food in the United States, 1890-1920.\u201d (2014)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maureen Mahoney (PhD): \u201cWhen Europe Re-Built American Cities: Daniel H. Burnham\u2019s City Beautiful Movement, Jane Addams\u2019 Hull-House, and Emergent Internationalism, 1890-1920.\u201d (2013)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brian Foster (PhD): \u201cToward an Expert Peace: American Social Science and Liberal Internationalism.\u201d (2012)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Brison (MA Research Paper). \u201cGod is not neutral: George W. Bush, civil religion and the meaning of 9.11.\u201d (2010).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sean Curley, (MA Research Paper). \u201cChurchills and Chamberlains: the lesson of Munich ands the rise of neoconservatism.\u201d (2010).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liam Kennedy (co-supervision with Audra Diptee), (MA Research Paper), \u201cPerforming slavery at Colonial Williamsburg: revision, trauma, controversy and the Department of African American Interpretation and Presentation, 1979-1994.\u201d (2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melissa Horne (co-supervision with Pamela Walker as principal supervisor) (MA thesis), \u201cThe development of the concept of \u2018race\u2019 in the formative African American academies of the South from 1880-1930.\u201d (2008).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Current Graduate Supervisions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonnathan Koonings (MA Thesis), (2023-25)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23540,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"cu_people_first_name":"Andrew M.","cu_people_last_name":"Johnston","cu_people_initials":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_people_type":[61],"cu_people_expertise":[],"class_list":["post-205","cu_people","type-cu_people","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_people_type-faculty"],"acf":{"cu_people_job_title":"Associate Professor - Late 19th to 20th c. United States history; imperialism and foreign relations; liberalism and pluralism in American social thought; history of international thought; nuclear strategy; international feminist pacifism; Pragmatism; international history of the social sciences","cu_people_degree":"B.A. (Toronto), M.A. (Yale), M.Phil. (Cambridge), Ph.D. (Cambridge)","cu_building":"","cu_people_office_num":"","cu_people_pronoun":"","cu_people_designation":"","cu_people_email":"andrew.johnston@carleton.ca","cu_people_phone":"","cu_people_phone_ext":"4154","cu_people_linkedin":"","cu_people_bluesky":"","cu_people_twitter":"","cu_people_instagram":"","cu_people_facebook":"","cu_people_website":"http:\/\/andrewjohnston9.wixsite.com\/mysite","cu_people_orcid":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_people"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26612,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people\/205\/revisions\/26612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_people_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people_type?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"cu_people_expertise","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people_expertise?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}