The Foreign Service Journal, March 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2019 9 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Happy 100th Birthday, FSJ ! BY SHAWN DORMAN W ith great foresight (or faulty math?), we began to celebrate The Foreign Service Journal ’s centen- nial, “Defining Diplomacy for 100 Years, ” last April with a wonderful collection of stories about and excerpts from the Journal throughout its history. That timeline, worth another look, captures Foreign Service and diplomatic history in the unique way only this publication can—through the eyes of the practitio- ners. The timeline and the accompanying articles gave us a base from which to dig even deeper into the near-century of Journal s as we created the FSJ Centen- nial Exhibit, opening this month at the U.S. Diplo- macy Center. Our long-term project to digitize and share online the entire library of FSJ s, and to enhance the search function to make it findable, was fully completed in early February, just in time for the publication’s 100th birth- day. The digital archive enabled us to create the exhibit, which will be on view in the U.S. Diplomacy Center pavilion at the State Department (inside the 21st Street entrance) frommid-March through Foreign Service Day on May 3. Please join us for the exhibit’s opening reception March 20, 4:30-6 p.m., to toast the little journal that could, and to take a trip through the dynamic history captured on the exhibit panels—the history of your pro- fession and role in the world. I must be honest: Putting together the exhibit was hard work. I am so grateful to the publications/ FSJ team at AFSA—Susan Maitra, Donna Gorman and Dmitry Filipoff— for all the extra work done these last few months, and to our designers, Jeff Lau from the communications team and Caryn Suko Smith of Driven by Design, who puts together Shawn Dorman is the editor of The Foreign Service Journal. the Journal every month. And I’m grateful to AFSA President Ambassador Barbara Stephenson for understanding and encouraging us to pursue this opportunity. Great appreciation goes, too, to the U.S. Diplomacy Center for seeing the potential and value of a centennial exhibit and giving us the green light to create and display it at USDC. Once the exhibit is taken down in May, AFSA will aim to use it for ongo- ing outreach as we con- tinue to share the Foreign Service story around the country. A Problem of Abundance Finding—and choos- ing!—the best, most illustrative content to share in the exhibit was challenging. First, we are word people but an exhibit has to be visual, not text-heavy. Those big, bold five-foot-high and 10-foot-wide walls are daunting; and you can only fit so many elements on one panel without creating a great big mess. Second, and more serious, is the surfeit of riches that the digital archive contains. Like a vortex, the archive pulls you in, making it almost impos- sible to just look at the one thing you went in for. Every single issue contains a great variety of intriguing material. For example, I’d go into the April 1927 edition for a piece on the new law establishing the Foreign Commerce Service, but in no time find myself drawn off to the Azores with the Portuguese consul to San Francisco … and then pulled into rough waters with a tale of pirates in the South China Sea by the U.S. consul in Hong Kong—all in just one issue. I’m just a couple clicks away from the August 1990 edition, and there we see Carl Sagan speaking about global warming at an AFSA conference, “American Business and Global Environ- mental Issues,” bringing together members of Congress, State Department officials, U.S. business leaders and scientists.