Nancy C. Unger

Christopher McKnight Nichols

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Andrew Preston

Elizabeth Borgwardt

"In recent years, historians and other scholars have offered useful definitions, most of which coalesce around the notion that grand strategy is an amplification of the "normal" strategic practice of deploying various means to attain specific ends. "The crux of grand strategy," writes Paul Kennedy, co-founder of the influential Grand Strategy program at Yale University, "lies...in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation's leaders to bring together all the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation's long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests." John Lewis Gaddis, the program's co-founder with Kennedy, defines grand strategy succinctly as "the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities." Hal Brands, an alumnus of Yale's program and a contributor to this volume, observes that grand strategy is best understood as an "intellectual architecture that lends structure to foreign policy; it is the logic that helps states navigate a complex and dangerous world." Peter Feaver, who followed Yale's model when establishing a grand strategy program at Duke University, is somewhat more specific: "Grand strategy refers to the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state's deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state's national interest." International Relations theorist Stephen Walt is even more precise: "a state's grand strategy is its plan for making itself secure. Grand strategy identifies the objectives that must be achieved to produce security, and describes the political and military actions that are believed to lead to this goal. Strategy is thus a set of 'contingent predictions': if we do A, B, and C, the desired results X, Y, and Z should follow.""--

Rethinking American Grand Strategy

Spreading democracy abroad or protecting business at home: this book offers a new look at the history of the contest between isolationalism and internationalism that is as current as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as old as America itself, with profiles of the people, policies, and events that shaped the debate.

Christopher McKnight Nichols

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