Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age - Hardcover

Nichols, Christopher McKnight

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674049845 ISBN 13: 9780674049840

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Spreading democracy abroad or taking care of business at home is a tension as current as the war in Afghanistan and as old as America itself. Tracing the history of isolationist and internationalist ideas from the 1890s through the 1930s, Nichols reveals unexpected connections among individuals and groups from across the political spectrum who developed new visions for America's place in the world.

From Henry Cabot Lodge and William James to W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams to Randolph Bourne, William Borah, and Emily Balch, Nichols shows how reformers, thinkers, and politicians confronted the challenges of modern society--and then grappled with urgent pressures to balance domestic priorities and foreign commitments. Each articulated a distinct strain of thought, and each was part of a sprawling national debate over America's global role. Through these individuals, Nichols conducts us into the larger community as it strove to reconcile America's founding ideals and ideas about isolation with the realities of the nation's burgeoning affluence, rising global commerce, and new opportunities for worldwide cultural exchange. The resulting interrelated set of isolationist and internationalist principles provided the basis not just for many foreign policy arguments of the era but also for the vibrant as well as negative connotations that isolationism still possesses.

Nichols offers a bold new way of understanding the isolationist and internationalist impulses that shaped the heated debates of the early twentieth century and that continue to influence thinking about America in the world today.

About this title

From the Back Cover

ReviewThis is a thoughtful and important contribution to the intellectual history of U.S. foreign relations and to scholarly understanding of the forces shaping a broader U.S. international engagement in the twentieth century. (Ian Tyrrell American Historical Review 2012-04-01)
ReviewJust what did isolationists think--and say--in the early twentieth century? Christopher Nichols provides some provocative answers to that question in Promise and Peril, which is far more intellectually venturesome than its textbookish title suggests. Nichols has written a rediscovery of the isolationist tradition, a thorough and timely account of thinkers as diverse as William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Eugene Debs and Jane Addams... Nichols has accomplished a major feat, demonstrating that isolationism was a far richer and more complex intellectual tradition than its critics have ever imagined--one that still speaks to our own time, freshening the stale formulas of the Washington consensus and allowing us to reimagine the role of the United States in the world. (Jackson Lears The Nation 2012-08-28)
ReviewThis is an important book that broadens the context of turn-of-the-century isolationist thought and the domestic politics of American foreign relations. Most fundamentally, it demands that historians take isolationism more seriously than we have hitherto. Nichols provocatively prompts us to see it not as a limited and reactive political movement of 1919-20 or of the 1930s, but rather as a malleable and evolving intellectual and political tradition... Nichols has produced a very fine book that should reopen discussion of American isolationism. He deserves a round of applause. Promise and Peril should be widely read. (Jay Sexton Journal of American Studies 2012-11-01)

About the Author

Christopher McKnight Nichols is Assistant Professor of History at Oregon State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0674049845
• ISBN 13: 9780674049840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464