The Creation of a Republican Empire traces American foreign relations from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War, paying particular attention not only to the diplomatic controversies of the era but also to the origins and development of American thought regarding international relations. The primary purpose of the book is to describe and explain, in the diplomatic context, the process by which the United States was born, transformed into a republican nation, and extended into a continental empire. Central to the story are the events surrounding the American Revolution, the constitutional Convention, the impact on the United States of the European wars touched off by the French Revolution, the Monroe Doctrine, the expansionism of the 1840s, and the ordeal of the Civil War.

The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 analyzes the period between the American Civil War and World War I (1865-1913) as the formative basis for twentieth-century American world power—"The American Century" as it has become known—and examines the "Imperial Presidency" that these roots produced. The extent of U.S. power was so great that it not only transformed American society, but reshaped other societies around the globe as well, by helping fuel—and in some cases directly causing—the great revolutions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, Panama, and Central America. The book, therefore, not only examines American history, but the history of many other areas that were dramatically affected by U.S. power as they entered the twentieth century.

Covering the history of U.S. foreign relations through two momentous world wars, this volume reveals how the U.S. emerged as the key global power, actively participating in wars, promoting trade and investment throughout the world, and Americanizing other countries' ways of life.

Based on the most recent American, Chinese, and Soviet literature, and written from a post-Cold War perspective, this volume spans the origins of Soviet-American conflict in 1945 through the crises of 1991, including all of the major Cold War foreign policy issues.