The Contours of American History

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Review quote "One of the most original home-grown minds in American history. The welcome republication of The Contours of American History should make William Appleman Williams' stature and foresight as an analyst of the basic patter of US history transparently evident. Greg Grandin's preface is a terrific introduction to Williams' thinking. In a way, the study of history has come full circle, back to examining the interconnections between domestic and international history. Back to Williams, in other words.

It is quietly reasoned, beautifully ordered, and spirited as hell Book ratings by Goodreads. Goodreads is the world's largest site for readers with over 50 million reviews.

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We're featuring millions of their reader ratings on our book pages to help you find your new favourite book. Puritan, Planter, Hamiltonian and Homesteader: He originally intended to establish a righteous Eden. But the Devil, cleverly camouflaged as the noble savage, already claimed the Virgin.

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Thus the Puritan had first to contain and defeat the red man…. Morality ceased to be the means of communicating with God and the guide to the good life…. Only the Devil, warned the Puritan, spoke of the general welfare. Thus the Puritan gave way to the Planter, who comforted and wooed the Virgin…. Not until the Puritan pointed to the evil of the slave did the Planter and the Virgin take up the language of noblesse oblige. It was then too late. And on it goes, with Williams introducing the Hamiltonian empire builder, who vanquished the Planter, and the Homesteader, a potential repository of a nonimperial America but compromised by his ties to the Hamiltonian and the Planter.

At this point Williams was an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, a land-grant university tucked into a remote corner of the continental United States.

He perversely cast FDR not as a Hamiltonian but as a Planter who renovated noblesse oblige for the industrial age and reconciled the Homesteader Henry Wallace! The real task, Williams said, was to understand how Turner served as a guide to policy-makers, including presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who saw the American border not as a line to stop at but as one to cross. Militarists might have been dreaming of national regeneration, farmers and industrialists of international markets, labor leaders of social peace and a piece of the pie, intellectuals of an outlet for individualism in a world of corporate concentration, and missionaries of deliverance, but all came to share a vision in which domestic progress and prosperity were dependent on unfettered expansion.

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The acquisition of overseas territory—as opposed to the fruits of mainland Manifest Destiny—provoked a great national debate between imperialists and anti-imperialists. The Open Door promised perpetual peace. The grail was the Chinese market. But rivals like Japan, czarist Russia and Germany kept getting in the way, embroiling the United States in its own Great Game of geopolitics and war. Rather than discrediting the Open Door, opposition heightened the magnetism of the idea, uniting realists and idealists and pulling anti-imperialists into intervention.

Neither revolutions in Mexico, China and Russia nor insurgencies against Marine occupations in the Philippines and the Caribbean were dealt with as effects of economic restructuring or US militarism. Berle favorably reviewed Tragedy in the New York Times , thinking it a corrective to the excesses of the early cold war. It is one thing to conquer a subject people; another to occupy vacant real estate. Yet through it all he would continue to discern the same pattern of denial.

Niebuhr was an anti-imperialist in his youth, yet Irony served as something of a blank postdated check, underwriting intervention and liquidating its deficits.

Education and Social Change Contours in the History of American Schooling

Williams had no illusions about the Soviet Union; he criticized its repression of intellectuals. Williams identified in the debates about how to respond to a revived USSR the same merry-go-round logic that emerged after It is true that Williams was at his weakest when, forgetting his criticisms of Hofstadter, he attributed psychological mass support to imperialism.



James asked after finishing Contours —but from expansion hitting a wall, which Williams kept thinking was imminent. Yet each time Williams was proven wrong, his larger argument was confirmed.

See a Problem?

Bush enters stage right. If we start with Niebuhr, who eventually found the irony of Vietnam too much to bear, we have to somersault over this history to explain the past seven years. With Williams, the present flows from the past. His most famous restoration project was Herbert Hoover; it seemed that every time Schlesinger wrote a book about FDR, Williams would counter by finding some new, underappreciated quality in the man New Dealers loved to ridicule.

But he would certainly appreciate the irony that China, long imagined as the ultimate frontier, the great absorber of American surplus, now keeps the United States afloat to serve as its capital and commodity market.