Miscellaneous Writings
A compilation of short pieces, correspondence, and occasional writings by Quigley
Also known as: Misc, Quigley Miscellany
Miscellaneous Writings is a catch-all of shorter Quigley pieces that did not fit a dedicated work file — short newspaper and yearbook columns, exchanges of correspondence, faculty-page essays, and occasional commentary published in The Courier and similar Georgetown outlets across the 1950s and 1960s. Useful as a citation source for one-off remarks and as evidence of Quigley's day-to-day intellectual engagement with students and the wider community.
Scope
Seventeen pages of miscellany. The opening item — a 'Faculty Corner' exchange in The Courier (December 12, 1952) — is characteristic: a Georgetown undergraduate writes to Quigley asking him to settle a dispute about the relative size of the German and Czechoslovak armies at the September 1938 Munich crisis. Quigley responds with a detailed, sourced answer (citing L.B. Namier's Europe in Decay among others), explaining that Czechoslovakia had 'thirty-four first-rate divisions under arms' against thirty-one to thirty-six German divisions, many at two-thirds strength, with substantial French and Russian forces available — establishing the military case that appeasement at Munich was not, as the conventional defense holds, a response to overwhelming German superiority. Other items in the collection follow similar patterns: short, sharp, sourced commentary on questions of the moment.
Structure
An unstructured compilation of items in roughly chronological order, drawn from various Georgetown student and faculty publications across Quigley's career. Items range from one to several pages. Most are responses to student questions, faculty columns, or short occasional pieces. There is no editorial apparatus binding them together — the value of the compilation is precisely that it preserves the shorter, more conversational Quigley alongside the major works.
Method — Quigley in Conversation
These shorter pieces give an unusually clear picture of how Quigley thought in real time. The Munich-divisions exchange is methodologically representative: a student raises a factual dispute; Quigley gives the numbers, cites the source for each number, and steps back to the larger inference — that the conventional 'we couldn't have stopped Hitler at Munich' defense is empirically wrong. The same move is visible across the miscellany. Compared to Tragedy and Hope, the prose is less guarded and the inferences are more openly drawn. For readers trying to reconstruct what Quigley actually thought, as opposed to what he was willing to publish in a Macmillan-printed book, the miscellany is unusually useful.
Reader's Guide
Useful primarily as a citation source. Search by topic: the Munich material on Czechoslovak military strength; remarks on classroom teaching; faculty-page essays on the discipline of history; occasional commentary on contemporary politics. For first-time readers, the Faculty Corner Munich exchange is a good single-piece illustration of Quigley's working method — fact-dense, source-cited, methodologically severe, and unintimidated by an undergraduate's premise.
Cited in
- quigley-misc · p. 1 Quigley 1952-12-12
Faculty Corner — The Courier, December 12, 1952. For the Faculty Corner this week, the Courier has been fortunate in obtaining permission to print an exchange of correspondence between Mr. Jay Burke... and Dr. Carroll Quigley of the School of Foreign Service.
- quigley-misc · p. 2 Quigley 1952-12-12
Mr. Dowling's statement, regarding the size of the German Army at the time of the Munich crisis of September 1938, is quite accurate. In the third week of September Czechoslovakia had a million men and thirty-four first-rate divisions under arms.
- quigley-misc · p. 2 Quigley 1952-12-12
From every point of view, this was little less than Germany had at Munich, and, at Munich, if the British government [had resisted]...