The pre-Cold War motives of American intervention in Greece Most studies of U.S. relations with Greece focus on the Cold War period, beginning with the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947. There is little substance in the extant literature about American policy toward or interaction with Greece prior to World War II. This overlooks the important intersections between the two countries and their peoples that predated the Second World War. U.S. interest in Greece and its people has been long-standing, albeit primarily on an informal or unofficial level. Author Angelo Repousis explores a variety of resonant themes in the field of U.S. foreign relations, including the role of nongovernment individuals and groups in influencing foreign policymaking, the way cultural influences transfer across societies (in this particular case the role of philhellenism), and how public opinion shapes policy--or not. Repousis chronicles American public attitudes and government policies toward modern Greece from its war for independence (1821-1829) to the Truman Doctrine (1947) when Washington intervened to keep Greece from coming under communist domination. Until then, although the U.S. government was not actively in support of Greek efforts, American philhellenes had supported the attempt to achieve and protect Greek independence. They saw modern Greece as the embodiment of the virtues of its classical counterpart (human dignity, freedom of thought, knowledge, love of beauty and the arts, republicanism, etc.) and worked diligently, albeit not always successfully, to push U.S. policymakers toward greater official interest in and concern for Greece. Pre-Cold War American intervention in Greek affairs was motivated in part by a perceived association among American and Greek political cultures. Indebted to ancient Greece for their democratic institutions, philhellenes believed they had an obligation to impart the blessings of free and liberal institutions to Greece, a land where those ideals had first been conceived.

This book attempts to explain why despite widespread popular support (the “Greek Fire”) in the United States of America for the Greek Revolution, the promulgation in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine led to Washington D.C.’s non-recognition of the Hellenic efforts. It examines the origins and tradition of the diplomatic doctrine of neutrality and argues that the Monroe Doctrine represents its full realization. The new foreign policy doctrine is placed within its proper diplomatic framework, while the role of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams is highlighted. What remains remarkable, is how high on the U.S. policy agenda the Greek War of Independence was and how close it came to being politically vindicated. The epilogue of this book demonstrates based on specific historical episodes, that the “Greek Fire” and the Monroe Doctrine set in many ways the political framework that came to define Hellenic-American relations for almost the next two centuries.

The collection of essays discusses the background to President Truman's decision and its impact and legacy, recreating the atmosphere of post World War II containment issues and debates. The publication also looks forward by examining the current balance of power in the Mediterranean and its implications for United States policy toward this area. HIS051000

Between Freedom and Progress recovers and analyzes the global imaginings of Reconstruction’s partisans—those who struggled over and with Reconstruction—as they vied with one another to define the nature of their country after the Civil War. The remarkable technological and commercial transformations of the mid-nineteenth century—in particular, steam engines, telegraphs, and an expanded commercial printing capacity—created a constant stream of news, description, and storytelling from across and beyond the nation. Reconstruction’s partisans contended with each other to make sense of this information, motivated by intense political antagonism combined with a shared but contested set of ideas about freedom and progress. As writers, lecturers, editors, travelers, moral reformers, racists, abolitionists, politicians, suffragists, soldiers, and diplomats, Reconstruction’s partisans made competing claims about their place in the world. Understanding how, why, and when they did so helps ground our understanding of Reconstruction—itself a mysterious, transatlantic term—in its own intellectual context. Three factors proved pivotal to the making of Reconstruction’s world. First, from 1865 to the early 1870s, the interconnected issues of how to remake the Union and how to remake the South exerted a powerful hold on federal politics, defining the partisan landscape and inspiring rival arguments about what was possible and what was good. The daunting nature of these issues created a sense of crisis across the political spectrum, with political discourse ranging in tone from combative to euphoric to apocalyptic. Second, though domestic in nature, these issues were refracted through two broadly held beliefs: that the causes of freedom and progress defined history and that distinctive peoples with their own characters composed the world’s population. These beliefs produced a disposition to think of developments from across and beyond the United States as essentially relatable to each other, encouraging an intellectual style that favored wide-ranging comparisons. Third, far from being confined to the elite, this mode of thinking and arguing about the world lived and breathed in public texts that were produced and consumed on a weekly and daily basis. This commercialized and politicized world of mass publishing was highly unequal in structure and content, but it was also impressively vibrant and popular. Together, these three factors made the world of Reconstruction a global landscape of information, argumentation, and imagination that derived much of its vigor from domestic political battles.