In Awkward Dominion, Frank Costigliola offers a striking interpretation of the emergence of the United States as a world power in the 1920s, a period in which the country faced both burdens and opportunities as a result of the First World War. Exploring the key international issues in the interwar period—peace treaty revisions, Western economic recovery, and modernization—Costigliola considers American political and economic success in light of Europe's fascination with American technology, trade, and culture. The figures through which he tells this story include Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Henry Stimson, Charles Lindberg, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Ford.

“Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business. Going back to our country’s founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power—whether by government or banks—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. “An engaging call to arms,” (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.

In Imperialism and Global Political Economy Alex Callinicos intervenes in one of the main political and intellectual debates of the day. The global policies of the United States in the past decade have encouraged the widespread belief that we live in a new era of imperialism. But is this belief true, and what does ‘imperialism’ mean? Callinicos explores these questions in this wide-ranging book. In the first part, he critically assesses the classical theories of imperialism developed in the era of the First World War by Marxists such as Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bukharin and by the Liberal economist J.A. Hobson. He then outlines a theory of the relationship between capitalism as an economic system and the international state system, carving out a distinctive position compared to other contemporary theorists of empire and imperialism such as Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, and Ellen Wood. In the second half of Imperialism and Global Political Economy Callinicos traces the history of capitalist imperialism from the Dutch East India Company to the specific patterns of economic and geopolitical competition in the contemporary era of American decline and Chinese expansion. Imperialism, he concludes, is far from dead.

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.

Although the years 1921-48 saw a gradual strengthening of the so-called 'special relationship' between the United States and Great Britain, anglophobia remained a potent force in American political life throughout that period. In Twisting the Lion's Tail , John E. Moser examines this phenomenon, showing how traditional American images of King George III and the redcoats were revived by immigrants, farmers and other groups hoping to advance an anti-British agenda.

A central question in European history is how did a great power pre-eminent in 1918 lie defeated by the same enemy less than 20 years later. Until recently the explanation has been sought in fundamental weaknesses that could only leave the French of 1940 hamstrung and demoralized. Recent studies have challenged that view and now, for the first time, the revisionist approach is displayed in a single volume, both summarizing the research of others and drawing on the author's own work in the archives. The book is about as far from 'dry as dust' diplomatic history as it's possible to get. Its very readable and the author manages to show with the telling anecdote that even a serious subject has its comic side: that, for instance, the French High Command kept forces stationed in the Alps for seven years because no one in the foreign service had thought to pass on news about a secret treaty between Italy and France in 1902; or that after a particularly stressful meeting Andrew Bonar Law, the British prime minister, mouth to Poincaré, the French president, through the closed carriage window of his train 'and you go to hell', all the while smiling and exuding affability. Such episodes are not the substance of the book, but they oil its progress.

This book—the first long-term study of educational travel between France and the United States—suggests that, by studying abroad, ordinary people are constructively involved in international relations. Author Whitney Walton analyzes study abroad from the perspectives of the students, schools, governments, and NGOs involved and charts its changing purpose and meaning throughout the twentieth century. She shows how students' preconceptions of themselves, their culture, and the other nationality—particularly differences in gender roles—shaped their experiences and were transformed during their time abroad. This book presents Franco-American relations in the twentieth century as a complex mixture of mutual fascination, apprehension, and appreciation—an alternative narrative to the common framework of Americanization and anti-Americanism. It offers a new definition of internationalism as a process of questioning stereotypes, reassessing national identities, and acquiring a tolerance for and appreciation of difference.