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In the work being reviewed here, Walter LaFeber presents a “revisionist” interpretation of the origins of the Cold War and of the reasons for its length. This school of historiography has been well...

This sharply argued and well‐researched book is quite timely. Since 2012, Japan's policies have aimed at loosening the post‐1945, US‐imposed restraints on the Japanese military. Many Americans and ...

Amidst the Global Bloodshed, national upheavals, attempts of racial extermination, and the massive movement of what turned out to be historic political, economic, and social movements in a period of just five years, Franklin D. Roosevelt accomplished a great deal—enough to rank him, along with Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson, in the highest echelon of American leaders. Battling the last throes of isolationism during the later years of the 1930s, FDR finally took a unified nation into war in 1941. During the conflict, his administration did a remarkable job of maintaining a pro-war consensus and convincing Americans—most of whom had indicated only a few years earlier that they would not allow their sons and daughters to fight and die abroad, especially after Roosevelt himself had said as late as 1940 that such sacrifice might not be necessary—to participate wholeheartedly in a conflict that covered much of the globe, mobilized more than sixteen million American men and women, and killed in battle 292,000 of them.1

IN 1985, PETER N. STEARNS, THE EDITOR OF THE Journal of Social History, worried that his vibrant, rapidly growing field was dangerously separating itself from the field of foreign relations. He warned that unless the widening gap was narrowed, "we risk a harmful division of interest between a fascination with domestic matters and an apathy or resignation toward crucial questions of war and peace."' Stearns's warning was only a variation on themes in the first essay in the first issue of the American Historical Review ninety years earlier, William M. Sloane's "History and Democracy." Sloane, a member of Columbia University's department of history and the AHR's initial board of editors, worried that because historians in the 1890s were focusing on narrow national history (in this case especially, stressing "the importance of the United States"), they were violating "the doctrine of the unity of history," which most professed to believe in, and-more important-were reluctant to admit "that no country is more than one wheel in the series which moves the hands on the dial-plate of human progress." Sloane prefaced this emphasis on employing an international framework with words that sound uncomfortably familiar a century later: historians were finding in their "society a widespread discontent with the results of historical study as pursued today." He believed that the scholars of his time were to blame, for by stressing aspects of national history they had ended up emphasizing "American history. . . in deference to patriotic but unintelligent public opinion." With considerable prescience, Sloane identified several of the pivotal points scholars would have to debate in the future if they hoped to broaden their work. "More political history ... will no longer suffice for a public hungering after information"; it would have to be supplemented by accounts of "social, industrial, commercial, aesthetic, religious, and moral conditions of the common man." Historians would notably have to come to terms with the impact of technology and the nation's awesome mixture of races. For "our history has not been one of origins, but exactly the contrary"-that is, it had been continually transforming as the people of the United States met, mixed, and often forcefully collided with other peoples. After all, comparing maps of 1756 and 1895 "will show what proportion of the earth's surface we have pre-empted for our civilization in

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.