A William Appleman Williams Reader: Selections from His Major Historical Writings

by William Appleman Williams and Henry Berger

Book Overview

William Appleman Williams, who died in 1990, was arguably the most influential and controversial historian of his generation. His revisionist writings, especially in American diplomatic history, forced historians and others to abandon old clich s and confront disturbing questions about America's behavior in the world. Williams defined America's social, moral, constitutional, and economic development in uncompromising, iconoclastic, and original terms...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566630029
• ISBN13: 9781566630023
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 417 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

scholars like this help radicals

My 40 years of recapitulation of my year in Vietnam sometimes turn back my internal clock to years before I was born or smoked any Vietnamese products. Scholars must picture a context in which the judgments that now control marginal thinking were set in concrete. I think economic warfare is currently a large part of the war on drugs. I am not afraid to go way out on a limb by noticing that this book has a footnote identifying Leo Crowley (1889-1972) as the chief of the Office of Economic Warfare (1943-1945). Americans expected to have great power at the end of World War II to impose the Open Door Policy on the rest of the world to provide markets for American products at a time when other nations were vulnerable because of the disruptions casused by that war. Leo Crowley terminated Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union as soon as Germany surrendered. In 1945, Crowley told President Roosevelt about a rumor that the United States of America "was considering a loan to the Soviets of $10 billion, and that he [Crowley] thought it was wise to refrain from making any loan until more was known of their postwar attitude. He said that the President agreed." (p. 148). A global financial system run according to American and British bank standards has been the basic assumption which the linked book sees as the reason for American problems in the world in the 65 years since that conversation took place. The current abomination administration is never going to imagine a world free from a war on drugs in which conspiracies to violate American law by smuggling illegal substances into the United States of America and launder the money received for drug shipments threaten the basic assumptions of American law and order while the farmers around Marja sell opium to the usual buyers in the drug trade. The black market that exists in opposition to a well regulated global economy threatens to bankrupt any nation putting troops in Afghanistan because maintaining such government operations are part of the need to suck up trillions of dollars each year. Ideas about financial matters running deeply in the red seem ironic after reading so much about Stalin's need to keep revolutionary workers' movements in capitalist countries from overthrowing the governments there. To use the language of Wall Street, Stalin was a bull on Communism. He was confident that if given a peaceful opportunity to develop its program in Russia, communism would gradually appeal to more and more countries of the world. He felt this was particularly likely in the underdeveloped areas and in poorer industrialized nations. If this could be managed by getting aid from America and by restraining foreign Communists from seizing power through revolutions, then the movement toward socialism and communism would move slowly enough to avoid frightening the United States into retaliating against the Soviet Union itself. (p. 144).

Awesome Overview of the Work of an "American Original"

Although there are many folks, unfamiliar with movers and shakers in the academic world of history who have never heard of Williams, I predict, as the bloated and overfed American Empire careens ever closer to its demise, many more will. There may come a day when Williams will be rightfully regarded as the premier historian writing in late 20th century America. Through his work, from which eminent and central specimens are on display in this well-organized and conceived anthology, much of the charactertistic radical critique which emerged in the wake of the civil rights struggle in the South, on the campuses and communities throughout our country, found its basis in historical fact. In the late 1950's, in the shadow of the McCarthy era, when he returned to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, his alma mater, to teach, Williams inherited the mantle of that cumulative body of historical research and interpretation (from Frederick Jackson Turner and others) which was to become known as "The Wisconsin School" in historical scholarship. While not the first (although he was among the first) to articulate the idea that the primary aim of American foreign policy was to establish, assert, and maintain American privilege at the expense of much of the world's population, justified by a dubious ethos of "exceptionalism" and a reality of hardcore military aggression and wildcat corporatism, he was second to none in providing mountains of remarkably detailed and clear historical reconstructions to back his claims. His work as a historian is, in a word, dazzling. This work became known as revisionist history, which is a fancy academic rubric for the generally embarrassed admission on the part of the status quo that, "Yeah, hey this dude is right, and on the basis of the ton of evidence he provides, we can't deny it." I call this type of history "muscular", in that it takes a lot of integrity, honesty, and strength to produce. Among these fine qualities which characterize Williams' work is his ability to cut to the chase, immediately - a trait accentuated by the constraints of the form that a collection or an anthology imposes. Thus, this volume is an excellent choice to begin one's study of Williams, and an essential for any historian's bookshelf for a display of exemplary method, if not for all the rest. Another great insight to be found in Williams is his appreciation of the dialectical import of history and its resonance in the immediate sphere of our personal lives. We learn in the process of interacting with the historical conditions which frame events - large - as they affect our communities - small - as they inexorably force us to define ourselves through our responses to them. No one took as seriously Marx's observation that, "Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing." And no one to date has provided such a far ranging examination of the all too familiar ramifications of that predicament. For further commenta