Inside a U.S. Embassy is widely recognized as the essential guide to the Foreign Service. This all-new third edition takes readers to more than fifty U.S. missions around the world, introducing Foreign Service professionals and providing detailed descriptions of their jobs and firsthand accounts of diplomacy in action. In addition to profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world-from the ambassador to the consular officer, the public diplomacy officer to the security specialist-is a selection from more than twenty countries of day-in-the-life accounts, each describing an actual day on.

"As a British colony Americans relied on the far-flung British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants, but after the Revolution they had to scramble to create an American service. While the U.S. diplomatic establishment was confined to the major capitals of the world, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. As consular appointments were often used as a reward for authors and other talented people, the U.S. Consular Service could boast of such noteworthy members as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, and William Dean Howells. Winston Churchill's grandfather was an American consul, as was Fiorello La Guardia, later mayor of New York"--Unedited summary from book cover.