HST297 - The History of U.S. Foreign Relations

HST297 - The History of U.S. Foreign Relations

20 credits (semester 2)

Module Leader: Dr Alex Ferguson (2024-25)

Module Summary

George Washington famously warned against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence” in his farewell address in 1796. But history has challenged any idea of the United States as a self-contained, bounded nation. Rather, the U.S. has played an active role in world affairs and has been profoundly shaped by events and people outside its borders. This module surveys the history of the U.S. in global context, covering both the major foreign policy moments and trends in U.S. history—wars, government initiatives and interventions abroad, interstate diplomacy—as well as the less formal encounters, migrations, and transnational exchanges that constitute American foreign relations.

Primary and secondary source readings, lectures, and discussions will pay particular attention to the intersections between changes at home and developments abroad. The module will also introduce students to the relationship between U.S. foreign relations history and the digital humanities. Lectures and seminars will discuss the significance, strengths, and weaknesses of Wikipedia as one of the world’s most popular sources of historical knowledge today. Students will learn how to edit Wikipedia pages and will apply their knowledge of U.S. foreign relations history to this public history resource.

Teaching 

The module is taught via 11 weekly lectures, and 11 weekly seminars

Assessment

Please see this page for assessment details.

Selected Reading

• William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W.W. Norton, [1959] 1991)

• Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987)

• Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)

• Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995)

• Daniel Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) 

• Michael Hogan, The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the American Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

• Michael J. Hogan, ed., Paths to Power: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations to 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

• Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

• John Kelly, “U.S. Power, after 9/11 and before It: If Not an Empire, Then What?” Public Culture 15.2 (2003)

• Alfred Eckes and Thomas Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

• Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1991] 2004)

• “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review Vol. 111, No. 5 (December 2006)

• Walter Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008)

• George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: American Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

• Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)

• Thomas Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” and well as responses from Del Pero, Hoganson, and Logevall, The Journal of American History Vol. 95, No. 4 (March 2009)

• Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” in American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 5, (December 2011)

• Emily Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)

• Michael Hunt, The World Transformed: 1945 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [2004] 2013)

• Perry Anderson, “Imperium,” New Left Review 83 (September-October 2013)

• Frank Costigliola and Michael Hogan, eds., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

• Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire (Harvard University Press, 2013)

• Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

• Frank Ninkovich, The Global Republic: America’s Inadvertent Rise to World Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)

• David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy was (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)