The Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed on August 27, 1928, was an important landmark in the "peace fever" which swept the United States and Europe after World War I. Peace in Their Time is a highly readable account of the events leading up to the signing of the pact and their implications for American diplomacy. After World War I, private peace groups proliferated and rapidly became a significant force in American politics. These groups' activities were regarded by the Harding and Coolidge administrations as a bungling interference with the regular conduct of diplomacy. Ultimately, however, President Coolidge yielded to domestic pressure and the efforts of French foreign minister Aristide Briand to conclude a peace treaty. A protracted series of negotiations between the United States and France resulted in the multilateral Kellogg-Briand Pact, the treaty to "outlaw war." The Kellogg-Briand Pact, Mr. Ferrell writes, was the peculiar result of some very shrewd diplomacy and some very unsophisticated popular enthusiasm for peace. In analyzing the forces that produced the treaty, Peace in Their Time reveals significant aspects of American foreign policy in the interwar period.
Author
Robert Hugh Ferrell was an American historian and author of several books on Harry S. Truman and the diplomatic history of the United States. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during the Second World War and was an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. He received a B.S. in Education from Bowling Green State University in 1946 and a PhD from Yale University in 1951, where he worked under the direction of Samuel Flagg Bemis and his dissertation won the John Addison Porter Prize. He went on to win the 1952 Beer Prize for his first book, Peace In Their Time, a study of the making of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. He taught for many years at Indiana University in Bloomington, starting as an Assistant Professor in 1953 and rising to Distinguished Professor of History in 1974. He has held several notable visiting professorships, including Yale University in 1955 and the Naval War College in 1974.
