From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776

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Oxford University Press, Oct 28, 2008 - History - 1056 pages
The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation in print. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize-winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of prestigious Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. From Colony to Superpower is the only thematic volume commissioned for the series. Here George C. Herring uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America's dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world's greatest superpower. A sweeping account of United States' foreign relations and diplomacy, this magisterial volume documents America's interaction with other peoples and nations of the world. Herring tells a story of stunning successes and sometimes tragic failures, captured in a fast-paced narrative that illuminates the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation, and highlights its ongoing impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. He shows how policymakers defined American interests broadly to include territorial expansion, access to growing markets, and the spread of an "American way" of life. And Herring does all this in a story rich in human drama and filled with epic events. Statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman and Dean Acheson played key roles in America's rise to world power. But America's expansion as a nation also owes much to the adventurers and explorers, the sea captains, merchants and captains of industry, the missionaries and diplomats, who discovered or charted new lands, developed new avenues of commerce, and established and defended the nation's interests in foreign lands. From the American Revolution to the fifty-year struggle with communism and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, From Colony to Superpower tells the dramatic story of America's emergence as superpower--its birth in revolution, its troubled present, and its uncertain future.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Foreign Policy and the Birth of the Republic 17761788
11
The New Republic in a Hostile World 17891801
56
Republicanism Imperiled and Reaffirmed 18011815
93
The Assertive Republic 18151837
134
Slavery Expansion and the Road to Disunion 18371861
176
The Union the Confederacy and Civil War Diplomacy 18611877
224
Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age 18771893
265
Depression Isolationism and War 19311941
484
World War II and the Rise of American Globalism 19411945
538
Truman the Cold War and the Revolution in US Foreign Policy 19451953
595
15 Coexistence and Crises 19531961
651
Kennedy Johnson and the Limits of Power 19611968
702
17 Nixon Kissinger and the End of the Postwar Era 19691974
760
18 Foreign Policy in an Age of Dissonance 19741981
810
Gorbachev Reagan Bush and the End of the Cold War 19811991
861

8 The War of 1898 the New Empire and the Dawn of the American Century 18931901
299
The United States in World Affairs 19011913
337
Wilson the Great War and the Quest for a New World Order 19131921
378
11 Involvement Without Commitment 19211931
436
America as Hyperpower 19922007
917
Bibliographical Essay
965
Index
997
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. A leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, he is the former editor of Diplomatic History and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, among other books.

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