Description: Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, this reader uses a carefully selected group of primary sources and analytical essays to allow students to test the interpretations of distinguished historians and draw their own conclusions about the history of American foreign policy. This text serves as an effective educational tool for courses on U.S. foreign policy, recent U.S. history, or 20th Century U.S. history. Some of the new literature spotlights cultural relations, and the ways in which culturally constructed attitudes about class, gender, race, and national identity have shaped American's perceptions of the world and subsequently its overseas relationships.
Brief description: Dennis Merrill, a professor of history and department chair at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India's Economic Development, 1947-1963. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations honored him with a Stuart L. Bernath Article Prize, and he has received two Fulbright awards to India. His current research interests focus on U.S.-Third World relations during the Cold War and the history of international tourism.