Alfred Hermann Friedrich Vagts (December 1, 1892 in Basbeck – June 19, 1986 in

Cambridge, MA Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

) was a German poet and historian. Vagts served in the First World War as a captain in the German military and was awarded the Iron Cross first class. In the years 1923-1932 Vagts was a historian at the Institut für auswärtige Politik (Institute for Foreign Affairs) at the Hamburg university. In this role Vagts visited the Yale university in the United States where he worked with American historian Charles A. Beard. In 1927 he married Beard's daughter, Miriam. Their son,

Detlev Detlev is a German given name. It is a spelling variant of Detlef. People with this name Notable people with this name include: *Detlev Blanke (born 1941), interlinguistics lecturer at Humboldt University of Berlin *Detlev Bronk (1897–1975), ...

, was born in 1929. In 1932, with the rise of Nazism, the Vagts family left Germany for the UK. In 1933 they moved to the US, where Alfred became a US citizen. Initially he worked as an independent scholar. Between 1938 and 1939, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University before becoming a member of the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

at Princeton, where he remained until 1942. Then, until the end of WWII, Vagts served on the

Board of Economic Warfare The Office of Administrator of Export Control (also referred to as the Export Control Administration) was established in the United States by Presidential Proclamation 2413, July 2, 1940, to administer export licensing provisions of the act of July ...

. After the war, and until his death, Vagts continued to work as an independent scholarClaus-Dieter Krohn: ''Geschichtswissenschaften''. In: Claus-Dieter Krohn u. a. (Ed.): ''Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945''. Darmstadt 1998, pp. 747–760. Vagts's work comprises scientific and literary books as well as essays. His most well known work is ''The History of Militarism, Civilian and Military''. Vagts collaborated with

Hajo Holborn Hajo Holborn (18 May 1902, Berlin – 20 June 1969, Bonn) was a German-American historian and specialist in modern German history. Early life Hajo Holborn was born the son of Ludwig Holborn, the German physicist and "Direktor der Physikalis ...

, Eckhart Kehr, George W. Hallgarten, Fritz T. Epstein and

Hans Rosenberg Hans Rosenberg (February 26, 1904–June 26, 1988) was a German refugee historian whose works influenced a whole generation of post-war German scholars. Life Rosenberg was born in Hannover. Though of Jewish ancestry, he was raised as a Protes ...

Bibliography

* ''The History Of Militarism'', New York, 193
online
* Beard, Charles A., and Alfred Vagts. "Currents of thought in Historiography." ''American Historical Review'' 42.3 (1937): 460–483
online
* "Hopes and Fears of an American-German War, 1870–1915 I." ''Political Science Quarterly'' 54.4 (1939): 514-53
online
* Alfred Vagts and Caroline Farrar Ware, ''The Cultural Approach to History'', 1940 * ''Hitler's Second Army'', Washington, 1943 * ''Geography in War and Geopolitics'', 1943 * ''Landing Operations: Strategy, Psychology, Tactics, Politics, from Antiquity to 1945'', Harrisburg, 1946 * "The balance of power: Growth of an idea." ''World Politics: A Quarterly Journal of International Relations'' (1948): 82–101
online
* ''Defense and Diplomacy: The Soldier and the Conduct of Foreign Relations'', London/New York, 1956 * ''The Military Attaché'', Princeton UP, 196
online

Bibliography

References

Further reading