American–Medieval Borderlands: From the Yazoo Land Fraud to the Paris Peace Conference

The doctrine of national self-determination adjudicated at the Paris Peace Conference and adopted by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 was substantially articulated and executed by Woodrow Wilson’s special intellectual advisor, Charles Homer Haskins, the country’s most prominent medievalist. By then, he was principally known for his histories of the Anglo-Norman realm and its institutions. But as a protégé of Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, Haskins had written his doctoral dissertation on the Yazoo Land Companies and the broader history of land speculation and fraud in the fledgling United States: analyzing the political and legal consequences of this Georgia scandal as well as the socio-economic tensions that undergirded it. This paper considers how Haskins’s first work of historical research informed his developing interests in medieval history as well as his later ideas about the adjudication of territorial disputes, the nature of sovereignty and national identity, and the principles that should govern the drawing of state boundaries in Europe after the Great War.