In this pioneering book, "the man who has really put the counter-tradition together in its modern form" (Saturday Review) examines the profound contradictions between America's ideals and its uses of its vast power, from the Open Door Notes of 1898 to the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.
William Appleman Williams was one of America's greatest critics of US imperialism. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961, reached back to seventeenth-century British history to argue that the relationship between liberalism and empire was in effect a grand compromise, with expansion abroad containing class and race tensions at home. Williams was not the first historian to identify the United States as an imperial power, yet he was unique in linking domestic disquiet to the long history of American expansion, which he traced back to England's Glorious Revolution. Reaching deep into thirteenth century British history to identify the motor contradictions of what eventually would become known as liberalism, Williams presents a wholly original interpretation of US history; one where the story of the United States is the story of capitalism. Coming as it did before the political explosions of the 1960s, Williams's message was a deeply heretical one, and yet the Modern Library ultimately chose Contours as one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th Century. This fiftieth anniversary edition will introduce this magisterial work to a new readership, with a new introduction by Greg Grandin, one of today's leading historians of US foreign policy.
This work represents an important advance in the study of the interrelationships between business and U.S. foreign policy. Focusing on a single aspect of this broad field—the growth of industrial exports—William H. Becker demonstrates the complexity of business interests and behavior, of the bureaucratic and political forces at work in Congress and the Departments of Commerce and State, and of the interplay between business and governmental practices and concerns. In so doing, he provides the first full analysis of the industrial, political, and bureaucratic context in which the U.S. became a major exporter of industrial products.
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