William Appleman Williams

The Shaping of American Diplomacy is a comprehensive collection of readings and documents that traces the development of American foreign relations from 1750 to 1955. The book is edited by William Appleman Williams and includes primary sources such as speeches, treaties, and diplomatic correspondence, as well as secondary sources such as essays and analyses by prominent scholars of American foreign policy. The book is organized chronologically, with each chapter covering a specific period in American history. The readings and documents included in each chapter offer insights into the key events, trends, and debates that shaped American diplomacy during that time. Topics covered include the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. The book also includes a comprehensive introduction by Williams that provides an overview of American foreign policy and its evolution over time. Additionally, each chapter includes a brief introduction that contextualizes the primary sources and provides background information on the key players and events of the period. Overall, The Shaping of American Diplomacy is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the history of American foreign relations and the factors that have shaped U. S. foreign policy over the past two centuries. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

This incisive interpretation of American foreign policy ranks as a classic in American thought. First published in 1959, the book offered an analysis of the wellsprings of American foreign policy that shed light on the tensions of the Cold War and the deeper impulses leading to the American intervention in Vietnam. William Appleman Williams brilliantly explores the ways in which ideology and political economy intertwined over time to propel American expansion and empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The powerful relevance of Williams’s interpretation to world politics has only been strengthened by recent events in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. Williams allows us to see that the interests and beliefs that once sent American troops into Texas and California, or Latin America and East Asia, also propelled American forces into Iraq.

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.