America as a World Power in the Modern Era

Catalog description

This class will examine the history of U.S. foreign policy, beginning the U.S. rise to world power at the dawn of the 20th century and concluding with an examination of the foreign policies of Presidents Bush and Obama. It will ask you to weigh the arguments scholars alongside firsthand (primary source) evidence, to make your own assessments of motivations, goals, causation, and consequences. Above all, it will ask you to think historically about the last century of U.S. foreign policy, and to consider a broad range of factors: ideology, domestic politics, geopolitics, race, psychology, culture, and bureaucracy, sometimes in complementary ways. Our task is to understand the critical choices made over the past century, both in their own right and for the broader lessons that a comparative historical perspective might provide.