Grounded in archival research conducted in the archives of the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization, as well as in other archives in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, The Birth of Development provides a foundational understanding for many of today’s debates on economic globalization, especially those that involve the World Bank and World Trade Organization. Given the current role of international peacekeepers and multinational aid agencies, this story is timely and makes clear that the issues that confronted early postwar planners and reformers remain in many ways unsolved even today.

In Those Days is the candid, often funny, autobiography of a twentieth-century American diplomat who spent most of his life in high-level diplomacy in Asia and Africa. The story takes James Spain form an Irish Catholic childhood in gangster-era Chicago through military service as Douglas MacArthur’s photographer in occupied Japan and university life at Chicago and a Ph.D. from Columbia. His Foreign Service career brought postings in Islamabad, Istanbul, and Ankara and four ambassadorships—in Tanzania, Turkey, the United Nations (as deputy permanent representative), and Sri Lanka.

With the fighting in World War II over in mid-August 1945, more than one-half million American troops moved to occupy Japan. Much of the country was ruined, buried under the rubble and debris of saturation bombing and the atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan’s rulers were stunned by defeat, and its people resigned to whatever the victors might impose upon them. Aftermath of War described the American transformation of Occupied Japan to be the greatest success story of United States policy in Asian. Howard Schonberger argues that this success came at a high price. Many of the popularity supported democratic reforms promoted by Americans in the early years of the Occupation were scuttled. Asian peoples developed a fear of the new Japan as a junior partner of the United States in opposing their legitimate revolutionary aspirations. Finally Japanese exports have triggered a dangerous xenophobic reaction in the United States in recent years. Schonberger recounts the rise of the new Japan through the eyes of eight Americans centrally engaged in events of the Occupation. Aftermath of War provides insights into the recent conflicts between the U.S. and Japan and recaptures the ideological debate within the United States over the future course of Japan. It implicitly suggests that Americans and Japanese seriously reconsider the post-surrender reform agenda rejected by official American policy after 1947.

Using a wide array of primary materials from both sides of the Atlantic, Myers traces the sources of potential Anglo-American wartime turmoil as well as the various reasons both sides had for avoiding war. And while he does note the disagreement between Washington and London, he convincingly demonstrates that transatlantic discord was ultimately minor and neither side seriously considered war against the other.

The five armistices arranged in the fall of 1918 determined the course of diplomatic events for many years. The armistice with Germany, the most important of the five, was really a peace treaty in miniature. Bullitt Lowry, basing his account on a close study of newly available archives in Great Britain, France, and the United States, offers a detailed examination of the process by which what might have been only simple orders to cease fire instead became extensive diplomatic and military instructions to armies and governments. He also assesses the work of the leading figures in the profess, as well as supporting casts of generals, admirals, and diplomatic advisors.

“Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts…” urged President John F. Kennedy on March 13, 1961. “Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggle of people everywhere—not with an imperialism of force or fear, but the rule of courage and freedom and hope for the future of man.” Similar calls stirred Latin America. In Brazil, it came from left-wing politicians, intellectuals, labor leaders, and students. The revolution on April Fool’s Day, 1964 was not exactly the one the Brazilian Left had sought. Nor was the uncontested military coup the victory of courage and freedom and hope that Kennedy had called for.

Keeping the Convenant traces the efforts of these dedicated internationalists during the interwar period. The individual and organizational efforts of League of Nations and World Court supporters, as well as those who supported the creation of friendship societies, religious ecumenism, international languages, and world citizenship are covered in rich detail. Analysis of their disagreements and divisions, which prohibited a single, unified response in support of League of Nations membership, provides the central theme.

In almost all these essays, newly released materials in presidential libraries and in the National Archives have been used. The result is a history of the past 40 years of NATO from an American perspective, placing the alliance within the larger frame of America’s foreign policy as a superpower. The historians’ interpretations benefit from their intimacy with cognate issues on which each has written over the years. Whatever their individual interpretations, each reveals the important role. NATO has played in fashioning the “American Century.”

There is no shortage of literature addressing the workings, influence, and importance of NATO and the Warsaw Pact individually or how the two blocs faced off during the decades of the Cold War. However, little has been written about the various intrabloc tensions that plagued both alliances during the Cold War or about how those tensions affected the alliances’ operation. The essays in NATO and the Warsaw Pact seek to address that glaring gap in the historiography by utilizing a wide range of case studies to explore these often-significant tensions, dispelling in the process all thoughts that the alliances always operated smoothly and without internal dissent.

Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution,” 1945–1956, is the first full-scale study of Finland’s role in Soviet-American relations during the onset of the cold war. Cold war Finland was an enigma. Defeated by the Soviet Union in World War II, the country appeared ripe for joining the “people’s democracies” in 1945, when the […]