Rising Isolationism, A Renewed Danger?

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, [...]

Moving Beyond (and Before) the Cold War

I’ll take up the point raised by Shane Maddock’s recent post on moving beyond the Cold War.  I share his feeling that the focus on the conflict has imposed its own “interpretive framework” on scholarship in U.S. foreign relations and international history generally and that this scaffolding can limit our understanding of a slew of [...]

Back to the Shores of Tripoli

One of the most overused clichés in the English language is “history repeats itself.”  Yet the events of the past several months seem to prove the point.  Trouble with pirates in the Mediterranean?  Conflict between the west and Islam?  The aftereffects of nuclear power in Japan?  We’ve seen all of these before.  But most recently, [...]