From Colony to Superpower

A finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this prize-winning and critically acclaimed history uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America's dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world's greatest superpower. George C. Herring tells a story of stunning successes and sometimes tragic failures, captured in a fast-paced narrative that illuminates the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation, and highlights its ongoing impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. He shows how policymakers defined American interests broadly to include territorial expansion, access to growing markets, and the spread of an "American way" of life. And Herring does all this in a story rich in human drama and filled with epic events. Statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman and Dean Acheson played key roles in America's rise to world power. But America's expansion as a nation also owes much to the adventurers and explorers, the sea captains, merchants and captains of industry, the missionaries and diplomats, who discovered or charted new lands, developed new avenues of commerce, and established and defended the nation's interests in foreign lands. From Colony to Superpower captures all this as it tells the dramatic story of America's emergence as superpower--its birth in revolution, its troubled present, and its uncertain future.

ISBN 0199765537   Weight (grammes) 1502 ISBN13 9780199765539 (What's this?)   Published in New York Publisher Oxford University Press Inc   Series title Oxford History of the United States Imprint Oxford University Press Inc   Previous ISBN 9780195078220 Format Paperback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 26 May 2011   Width (mm) 168 DEWEY 973.3   Spine width (mm) 56 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level General Pages 1056

"Herring recaptures a quarter-millennium of American foreign policy with fluidity and felicity...we have long been waiting for a single-volume history like this one." New York Times Book Review

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