The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: Volume 2, the American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913

Since their first publication, the four volumes of the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations have served as the definitive source for the topic, from the colonial period to the Cold War. This revised second volume describes the causes and dynamics of United States foreign policy from 1865 to 1913, the era when the United States became one of the four great world powers and the world's greatest economic power. The dramatic expansion of global power during this period was set in motion by the strike-ridden, bloody, economic depression from 1873 to 1897 when American farms and factories began seeking overseas markets for their surplus goods, as well as by a series of foreign policy triumphs, as America extended its authority to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, Central America, the Philippines, and China. Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt set foreign policy precedents by creating historic policies in which they used the post-1890 battleship fleet, a navy that quickly became one of the world's most powerful fleets. Ironically, as Americans searched for opportunity and stability abroad, they instead helped create revolutions in Central America, Panama, the Philippines, Mexico, China, and Russia. These outbreaks introduced the twentieth century as a century of revolutions with which the United States would have to deal as a top world power.

Author: Walter LaFeber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/16/2015
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.61d
ISBN: 9781107536203

About the Author
LaFeber, Walter: - Walter LaFeber is Andrew Tisch and James Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Cornell University. He is the author of America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006, 10th edition (2007), The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1865-1898, 25th anniversary edition (1998), which received the Albert G. Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association, The Clash: US-Japan Relations throughout History (1997), which received the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, The American Age: US Foreign Policy Abroad and at Home since 1750, 2nd edition (1994), and Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 2nd edition (1992), which won the Gustavus Myers Prize.