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83 William Linn Westermann at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 History, in many circles, is a derisive, even pejorative word. In movies, the killers often dispatch their victims with the sneer, “You’re history!” More generally, all kinds of people dismiss something as irrelevant by saying, “That’s history.” Professional historians dislike this use of the word, but in their heart of hearts they often feel the sting of truth. Every historian has occasionally sighed with regret that he or she was not there to witness or participate in an event that he or she was studying. Many historians, even those working in recent political history, believe that they take a vow of renunciation from public affairs when they decide to pursue their discipline. Journalists and political scientists often regard historians of the recent past as quaint or archaeological. History, in the pejorative sense, has a way of beginning very recently, and think how much worse this stigma is for those who study more remote times in the past. Yet there have been instances when a historian has been able to participate in history as it was unfolding. A few historians have been able to do this, without setting aside their professional credentials, by, for example , serving in the military or going into politics. Still others have participated in a great event because of something they brought to the enterprise from their scholarship. Occasionally, historians have been sJohn Milton Cooper, Jr. Chapter 6 Meckler.ClassicalAntiquity 5/25/06 12:07 PM Page 83 84 William Linn Westermann at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 enlisted to witness what they would later record. World War II saw Samuel Eliot Morison’s assignment to write the history of the United States Navy, with a set of orders that allowed him to go wherever he wanted to see the action. The U.S. Army in that war had “combat historians ” who witnessed specific battles and campaigns. One historian was able to do even more. He was commissioned to be part of a great event more or less in his professional capacity. William Linn Westermann (1873–1954), then professor of ancient history at the University of Wisconsin, served as a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. On November 30, 1918, he received an appointment to what was called a “Specialist in Western Asia,” at a salary of $400 a month with an allowance for transportation and “subsistence” expenses.1 The United States entered World War I in April 1917, more than two and a half years after hostilities broke out. It shortly became clear to President Woodrow Wilson that the other Allies had already made extensive plans for the postwar settlement, plans that were not in accord with American interests or ideals. By the autumn of 1917, Wilson decided to entrust his political right-hand man, Colonel Edward M. House, with the task of collecting a group of experts to conduct research and draft policy papers. The experts initially assigned to study disposition of the Ottoman Empire were primarily scholars of antiquity. This subgroup was under the supervision of Dana C. Munro, a professor of medieval history at Princeton University , the university Wilson had previously led before entering politics.2 At the time of World War I, modern history had existed as a distinct subject within the academic discipline of history for only a generation or so, and the contemporary Middle East had yet to become a focus of university appointments and scholarly research. In the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, biblical scholars, scholars of antiquity, and Jews were those consulted as the experts for policy decisions involving the Ottoman Empire. Of the nine men who served as the United States ambassador to the Sultan in the four decades leading up to America’s entry into World War I, four were Jews and two others were scholars of academic repute with interests in antiquity : James B. Angell, the president of the University of Michigan and William McKinley’s first ambassador to Constantinople in 1897 and 1898; and the diplomat and scholar of East Asian antiquities, W. W. Rockhill, who represented the United States from 1911 to 1913 under William Howard Taft.3 Westermann, who had earned his Ph.D. in Germany at the University of Berlin, was a rising star among historians of classical antiquity. When he agreed to serve in the delegation to the Paris Peace...

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