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SHAFR Opinion

Is the System the Solution? Past Policies, Current Dilemmas, and Inter-American Relations in the 21st Century

by James Siekmeier

More than 20 years have passed since the last full-fledged U.S. military intervention in Latin America (Panama, 1989, in case your memories are hazy).  Starting in the 1980s, democratization flowered in the region for numerous reasons—but mostly internal reasons based in Latin American history and society. Starting in the 1990s, with the end of the [...]

Visions of War

by Susan Brewer

On December 15th President Barack Obama welcomed home U.S. troops from a war he once had called “dumb.” His speech avoided the reasons why the Iraq War was fought and focused instead on honoring the American servicemen and women who fought it.  Inspiring words–“extraordinary achievement,” “honor,” “sacrifice,” “finest fighting force,” “unbroken line of heroes,” “progress [...]

Newt Gingrich and the (ab)Uses of History

by Andrew Johnstone

It is an honor to join the SHAFR blogging team for 2011-12.  While SHAFR is (as the name makes perfectly clear) a society that focuses on the history of American foreign relations, there is no doubt that we are as well placed as anyone to make connections between historical events and contemporary issues in American [...]

Issues for the 2012 Presidential Election

by Nick Sarantakes

The United States of America is about to enter a presidential election year.  Actually, it already has entered the political season.  The election of 2012 will most likely turn on economics, but as Andy Johns pointed out in his blog, foreign policy is always important and next year’s contest will be no different.  In addition, [...]

W(h)ither the Bilateral Study?: what of the History of U.S. Foreign Policy can tell us about the Emergent Multilateral World

by James Siekmeier

Back during the Cold War, bilateral studies were common. Indeed the proliferation of bilateral studies seemed to be almost a natural process—it was thought that we humans were seemingly biologically hard-wired to separate things in to this/that, either/or,  good/evil, etc.
Recently, however, the genre of “United States and …[insert country name here] “ studies seem to [...]

Rising Isolationism, A Renewed Danger?

by Christopher McKnight Nichols

It is an honor to be kicking off the blog for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for the fall of 2011. I thank Andrew Johns, Brian Etheridge, and the officers of SHAFR for the invitation, and I look forward to an excellent year of diverse debates and dynamic discussions.
For this column, which [...]

A Note from Europe: The End of the World is Nigh

by Michaela Hoenicke Moore

The mid-July headline of the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) commenting on the two debt crises in Europe and the United States reads “The End of the World Is Near – But Only for You.” The article cleverly illustrates the deepening transatlantic gap when it comes to political and economic frames of reference. Americans are [...]

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Susan Brewer

About the author
Susan A. Brewer is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She is the author of _Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq_ (Oxford, 2009) and _To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II_ (Cornell, 1997).

Posts by Susan Brewer