Thomas G. Paterson

Paterson et al.'s account takes ideology seriously. Their integration of the American ideology of expansionism into the process of foreign policy is evidenced throughout their text. 3 For example, one sees this in their
explanation for America's entrance into WWI: "expansionist. American leaders were finally willing to fight in order to implant in the Old World the best principles and goods America had to offer." (p. 274) For Paterson et al., as for Michael Hunt, ideology is an analytical tool rather than a pejorative. Ideology, like "cultural baggage," cannot simply be overcome. Their account demonstrates that such simple dichotomies as idealism versus realism explain little, for example, in America's relationship with Latin America. This relationship is marked by a continuity of "insensitivity to the. nationalism of other peoples," (p. 250) which results form an ideology that defies categorization as realism or idealism.

For Paterson et al., it is the hegemonic ideology of capitalist democracy in concert with a belief in Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority which helps to explain America's arrogance with respect to Latin America. Louis A. Perez, Jr.'s dependency model thus fits in nicely with Paterson et al.'s consistent treatment of American domination of Latin America throughout the 20th century. Dependency theory cannot be reconciled with Jones's sporadic treatment of U.S. relations with Latin America.

Avoiding the pitfalls of imprecise language, including profuse end notes, and referring throughout to the work of other historians, Paterson et al.'s text is a far more intellectually challenging one than Jones's. Yet through their use of political cartoons, graphs, and detailed maps their text is also quite reader friendly. Reading American Foreign Policy, the student C) is exposed in a relatively painless manner to the interpretational issues at stake in the debates addressed in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. Reading The Course of American Diplomacy, the student runs the dual risks of boredom and remaining largely oblivious to the historiography of this discipline.… (más)

In the volume of essays entitled Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, scholars in the field of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy respond to growing criticism within the academic community that the discipline has become a "marginalized" subguild of the larger and more cosmopolitan guild of Americanists. Contributors to the volume marshal a wide range of approaches to the task of explaining the history of American foreign relations designed to return the disciple to the "cutting edge" of scholarship. Taken together, these essays present the current "state of the art.1I

The editors introduce this collection with a brief but extremely useful historiographical sketch, which traces the discipline from its birth in the inter-war years, through realism and New Left revisionism, and into the brave new world of post-revisionist synthesis. In the book's first section, Robert J. McMahon and Emily S. Rosenberg defend the discipline against two of the most persistent criticisms recently leveled at it, parochialism and the failure to integrate the "new social history" into its narrative. In concluding this first section, Thomas G. Paterson attempts to define the current parameters of the discipline by providing a comprehensive model for explaining the history of American foreign relations which includes a consideration of international, regional, national, and individual factors. This framework provides a way of integrating current research, as his own textbook bare witness.

The collection of essays which follows in the second section of this book is valuable as a means of testing the flexibility of textbook accounts. It is to be expected that these innovative approaches are of varying degrees of utility for a textbook treatment of 20th century American foreign policy and diplomacy, yet flexibility is a hallmark of the good textbook. The first task of any textbook must be to present the most significant information to an understanding of the subject at hand in a manner that allows for comprehension by the non-specialist. In this respect a textbook is conceptually more limited than a monograph.

The ability to integrate the less intricate of these new approaches into the understanding provided by the textbooks cited above is one measure of their quality. These two textbooks bear witness to the fact that textbook writers are limited by the need to present a certain body of accepted facts. Many of the same quotations from historical actors appear in both accounts, the periodization which they use is roughly analogous, and each concentrates on the same major events in the 20th century in developing their narrative. The presentations of American diplomatic and foreign policy history offered by these two accounts diverge primarily in their underlying assumptions about the process of history.… (más)