{{short description|American historian}} {{Infobox person | name = Alfred Vagts | birth_date = {{birth date|1892|12|1}} | birth_place = Basbeck | death_date = {{death date and age|1986|6|19|1892|12|1}} | death_place = Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. | other_names = | occupation = Historian, poet | years_active = | known_for = | notable_works = The History Of Militarism | children = Detlev F. Vagts }}
'''Alfred Hermann Friedrich Vagts''' (December 1, 1892, in Basbeck – June 19, 1986, in Cambridge, MA) 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.<ref>{{cite web | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/07/obituaries/miriam-beard-vagts.html | title = MIRIAM BEARD VAGTS | last = | first = | date = September 7, 1983 | work = The New York Times | access-date = May 29, 2019 | quote = }}</ref> Their son, Detlev, was born in 1929.<ref>{{cite web | url = https://today.law.harvard.edu/detlev-f-vagts-51-1929-2013/ | title = Detlev F. Vagts '51: 1929-2013 | last = | first = | date = January 1, 2014 | website = | publisher = Harvard Law Today | access-date = May 29, 2019 | quote = }}</ref>
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 at Princeton, where he remained until 1942. Then, until the end of WWII, Vagts served on the Board of Economic Warfare. After the war, and until his death, Vagts continued to work as an independent scholar.<ref name="Krohn">Claus-Dieter Krohn: ''Geschichtswissenschaften''. In: Claus-Dieter Krohn u. a. (Ed.): ''Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945''. Darmstadt 1998, pp. 747–760.</ref>
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''.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia | title = Vagts, Alfred | last = Crim | first = Brian | encyclopedia = Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing | volume = 2 | pages = 1251 | publisher = Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers | date = 1999}}</ref> Vagts collaborated with Hajo Holborn, Eckhart Kehr, George W. Hallgarten, Fritz T. Epstein and Hans Rosenberg.<ref name="Krohn" />
==Bibliography== * ''The History Of Militarism'', New York, 1937 [https://archive.org/details/historyofmilitar00vagt online] * Beard, Charles A., and Alfred Vagts. "Currents of thought in Historiography." ''American Historical Review'' 42.3 (1937): 460–483. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1838848 online] * "Hopes and Fears of an American-German War, 1870–1915 I." ''Political Science Quarterly'' 54.4 (1939): 514-535 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2143442 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. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2009159 online] * ''Defense and Diplomacy: The Soldier and the Conduct of Foreign Relations'', London/New York, 1956 * ''The Military Attaché'', Princeton UP, 1967 [https://archive.org/details/militaryattache00vagt online]
==References== {{reflist}}
==Further reading== * Rinke, Stefan H. "Clio in Exile: The Historiography of Alfred Vagts" ''Yearbook of German-American Studies'' (1991), Vol. 26, pp 267–281.
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Vagts, Alfred}} Category:20th-century German historians Category:20th-century German poets Category:1892 births Category:1986 deaths Category:German male poets Category:20th-century American historians Category:American male non-fiction writers Category:German emigrants to the United States Category:German expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:20th-century German male writers Category:20th-century American male writers Category:German Army personnel of World War I