friend of Armstrong, was the distinguished African-American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, whose first of five Foreign Affairs articles, in 1925, defined the "Color Line" as the key problem of the 20th century. Coolidge was delighted with this article, commenting (as Armstrong recalled in his memoir) that this was partly because it made him "squirm under the conclusions." Other issues of race and colonialism were frequently covered.

Women authors were slow to appear, though several became prominent in the late 1930s (Dorothy Thompson) and after the Second World War (Barbara Ward Jackson especially). From the first, while "high policy" was the focus of a plurality of the articles in the magazine, economics and trade had a large share, and such social issues as population became prominent from roughly 1944 on, largelythrough Professor Frank Notestein of Princeton.

A particular concern from the first, especially for the scholar Coolidge, was the Book Review section. To take charge of this, Coolidge after some failed experiments brought in a junior colleague from Harvard, who should be the third in our verbal portrait gallery.

William L. Langer, coming to Harvard from Roxbury via Boston Latin, then serving in the Army as an enlisted man, had become Coolidge's prize student and de facto successor in the field of European history. Few who attended his lectures, as I did as a one-year graduate student, will forget his nasal twang, the meticulous preparation that caused his lectures to end on the very stroke of the next hour, or finding him at lunch afterward most often in the corner