Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume I: To 1920

By Thomas G. Paterson, Dennis Merrill, Thomas Paterson

Book Overview

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, this reader uses a carefully selected group of primary sources and analytical essays to allow users to test the interpretations of distinguished historians and draw their own conclusions about the history of American foreign policy. This book serves as an effective educational tool for courses on U.S. foreign policy, recent U.S. history, or 20th Century U.S. history. The Seventh Edition introduces new studies on America's early foreign relations which seek to position the nation's post "9-11" attitudes and behaviors within historical context. Some of the new literature spotlights cultural relations, and the ways in which culturally constructed attitudes about class, gender, race, and national identity have shaped American's perceptions of the world and subsequently its overseas relationships.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547218249
• ISBN13: 9780547218243
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Cengage Learning
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Lessons Must Be Learned

Volume I of U.S. Foreign Policy is a well crafted book of primary documents to help an average American to understand the basis of U.S. foreign policy from the beginnings of the republic to the end of World War I. This book is not only recommended to the average reader, but to the foreign policy officers in the State Department. History seems to have repeated itself on many occasions, such as the incompetence of Presidents Madison in regards to Britain and Wilson in regards to foreign policy as a whole as well as the similarities between James K. Polk's Mexican American War and George W. Bush's Iraq War. The documents contained in this book are very beneficial to understanding that politics has a heavy hand in U.S. foreign policy, and will always have a hand in it. It is even fair to say that President Obama's re-evaluation about the War in Afghanistan had some elements of politics in it, therefore this book is highly recommended, because lessons from the past have not been learned.