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Americans used the oceans as a moat to protect themselves against the corruptions and armies of Europe, and a highway to reach the markets of Europe and Asia as well as the colonial settlements of West Africa. As trade developed between white Americans and the Congo, so, did links between Africans and African Americans. The Samoa as in West Africa, as a strategic base would help guard the routes to Asia to relieve the growing glut of U.S. goods. The Review of Reviews argued that Hawaii was essential because of its central position in the commerce of the Pacific Ocean and linked the islands directly to the importance of the China market. In the post-1865 era, U.S. foreign policy was consistently shaped by choosing opportunity, both secular and religious, over stability. Seward had placed U.S. policy in Asia on two principles: the use of force and cooperation with other powers.

Almost from their beginnings as an independent people, Americans used the oceans not as a moat to protect themselves against the corruptions and armies of Europe but as a highway to reach the markets of Europe and Asia as well as the colonial settlements of West Africa. In the 1780s, as a century later, merchants were driven abroad by the exigencies of economic depression at home, as well as by the attraction of profits (and settlements) overseas. By the 1830s, colonizers of both the white and black races had, with the help of several presidential administrations, established an American settlement for freed African-American slaves in Liberia. A decade later, driven again in part by the economic bad times of 1837 to 1841, U.S. officials signed their first treaty with China. In the next decade of the 1850s they sent Matthew Perry to open Japan to U.S. interests, both secular and religious. After 1865, the United States rapidly became one of the six great powers fighting over the remains of China’s Manchu dynasty and, for a time, even was an unlikely participant in the great colonial struggle over Africa’s riches. Africa, Kasson, and African Americans Africa burst into American (and much of the world’s) attention in 1870 when the New York Herald sent Henry M. Stanley to find the supposedly lost missionary David Livingstone in the interior of Africa. Stanley’s alleged greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” became famous, but Stanley’s discovery of the Congo’s rich mineral wealth received more attention at the time. In 1878 one of the great U.S. explorers, Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt, sailed along the West African coast and into several of its rivers.

The prominence of U.S military forces in the region after the 1880s placed the emphasis on obtaining economic opportunity and strategic footholds from which the United States could move to obtain further opportunities. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the British relationship with Canada made Great Britain one of the two major obstacles to U.S. expansionism. The opportunities for expansion seemed plentiful, but two problems, race and revolution, brought to a stop the plans of Grant to annex areas in the Caribbean region. Railroad builders had tried to lay track in the 1860s to link up with their own transcontinental system, but the plan fell to Mexico's anti-Americanism. The Good Neighbor approach in the 1889-90 conference produced an arbitration convention to help settle disputes, a recommendation to build a railroad uniting North and South America, and the establishment of the Commercial Bureau of American Republics.

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction Warren I. Cohen 2. Lyndon B. Johnson: change and continuity Waldo Heinrichs 3. Johnson, Vietnam, and Tocqueville Walter LaFeber 4. A time in the tide of men's affairs: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam Richard H. Immerman 5. Threats, opportunities, and frustrations in East Asia Nancy Bernkopf Tucker 6. Toward disillusionment and disengagement in South Asia Robert J. McMahon 7. Lyndon B. Johnson, Germany, and 'the end of the Cold War' Frank Costigliola 8. The promise of progress: United States relations with Latin America during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson Joseph S. Tulchin 9. Keeping Africa off the agenda Terrence Lyons 10. Balancing American interests in the Middle East: Lyndon Baines Johnson vs. Gamal Abdul Nasser Warren I. Cohen 11. Lyndon Johnson: the final reckoning Nancy Bernkopf Tucker.