To the pessimists, evidence that the field of diplomatic history is on the decline is everywhere. Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings. And now, in what seems an almost gratuitous insult, Diplomatic History, the sole journal devoted to the subject, has proposed changing its title.

For many in the field, this latest suggestion is emblematic of a broader problem: the shrinking importance not only of diplomatic history but also of traditional specialties like economic, military and constitutional history.

The future of the history profession (as well as the journal’s title) are the subject of a roundtable discussion to be held this month at the annual convention of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Many historians “are on the defensive,” said Thomas Zeiler, the executive editor of Diplomatic History and the moderator of the panel. (Zeiler, who floated the name change, said he did not have a particular replacement in mind.)

To Zeiler, there is no doubt that the days when diplomatic history dominated the profession are gone. Fewer traditional courses in the subject are taught, fewer articles are published in refereed journals, and graduate student training has changed. Nonetheless, Zeiler is not as worried as some of his colleagues. The shift does not necessarily mean students aren’t learning the material, he noted, but rather that a new approach to teaching it has developed.

The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects. Diplomatic historians, by contrast, generally work from the top down, diving into official archives and concentrating on people in power, an approach often tagged as elitist and old-fashioned.

Over the past three decades, the number of history faculty members at four-year institutions has more than doubled to 20,000-plus, said Robert Townsend, assistant director for research at the American Historical Association. Yet the growth has been predominantly in the newer specializations, spurring those in diplomatic, military, legal and economic history to complain that they are being squeezed out.

In 1975, for example, three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian; in 2005, fewer than half did. The number of departments with an economic historian fell to 31.7 percent from 54.7 percent. By contrast, the biggest gains were in women’s history, which now has a representative in four out of five history departments.

How have some departments sliced up the pie? At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, out of the 45 history faculty members listed (many with overlapping interests), one includes diplomatic history as a specialty, one other lists American foreign policy; 13 name either gender, race or ethnicity. Of the 12 professors of American history at Brown University, the single specialist in United States empire also lists political and cultural history as areas of interest. The department’s professor of international studies focuses on victims of genocide.

“The boomer generation made a decision in the 1960s that history was starting over,” said David Kaiser, a history professor at the Naval War College. “It was an overreaction to a terrible mistake that was the Vietnam War.” The result is that “history is no longer focused on government, politics or institutions.”

There are no reliable statistics on course offerings, but Kaiser and others argue there has been an obvious nosedive. “European diplomacy is just about completely dead,” Kaiser said, “and it’s very hard to find a course on the origins of the First World War.”

During a recent spirited online discussion among diplomatic historians prompted by the journal’s proposed name change, Brett Lintott, a first-year Ph.D. student in international relations at the University of Toronto, wrote of feeling a bit like the last woolly mammoth at the end of the Ice Age. “Being a young historian in this field is thus a rather lonely and sobering experience,” he wrote, adding that some historians treat his chosen specialty with “genuine derision.”

Though such debates are often cast in political terms (teaching the “history of dead white men” versus the history of neglected or oppressed people), the question is really more philosophical and pedagogical: How does the world work? How should students be taught?

Of course, academic disciplines, like finches, evolve all the time. “This is not about one field being shoved aside and another taking its place but about the natural evolution of a field,” said William Hitchcock, a diplomatic historian at Temple University whose book about the liberation of Europe, “The Bitter Road to Freedom,” was recently a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

In traditional fields like diplomatic history, nations are the basic building blocks, he explained. Pressing issues today like terrorism, global warming, infectious diseases, population growth, piracy, intellectual property, by contrast, don’t easily fit into borders.

So students still study, say, World War I and the Cold War, but while a traditional class would focus on the actions and statements of presidents and secretaries of state, a newer approach might look at how the imperial powers treated their colonies in the Middle East or how Soviet propaganda that tried to tarnish democracy by pointing to racism in America may have contributed to President Harry Truman’s decision to integrate the armed forces.

Anthony Grafton, a historian at Princeton whose expertise includes the history of scholarship, agrees that traditional fields aren’t disappearing; they are shifting focus. Military history, for example, has switched from battlefield strategy to subjects like “the way soldiers thought about what they were fighting for,” he said.

But critics like David Bell, the dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins University, argue that traditional diplomatic and economic history are still the specialties that are best suited to deal with America’s problems today.

Hitchcock remains unconvinced that there is a zero-sum game however. “How will we write the history of the Iraq war?” he asked. Social pressures, differing cultural and intellectual assumptions will all be included, he said: “We’ll widen our frame of reference, while not losing sight of the remarkable fact that a very small number of people still have the power to lead nations into war.”