THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Walter LaFeber's single-volume survey of two-and-a-half centuries of American foreign relations seeks several audiences. Most obviously, it aims to provide students with a lively, readable text without sacrificing interpretive vigor in the quest for comprehensiveness. The book succeeds admirably on that score; the color, passion, and lucidity of LaFeber's account should ensure numerous adoptions by instructors. At the same time, The American Age seeks to engage a broad professional readership: both diplomatic historians in need of an up-to-date synthesis and their American colleagues in need of a compact overview of a subject that, for all its importance, has of late become increasingly marginalized from the scholarly mainstream. "Social and diplomatic history have too seldom been wedded," LaFeber laments; his account strives "in a minor way to start, at least, the courtship" (p. xx). Probably no author could satisfy all those potential readers. That this volume comes so close attests powerfully to its author's skill. Several overarching themes inform this interpretation of American diplomacy. First, the quest for landed and commercial expansion drove the nation outward from the 1750s to the 1940s as American power inexorably strengthened. Then, beginning in the late 1950s, that power began its steady, if relative, decline. Second, from the birth of the republic America's external relations have been intimately related to the search for liberty, order, and prosperity at home. Foreign and domestic affairs have thus been inextricably intertwined throughout American history. Third, the United States, although never isolationist in the classic meaning of that term, has typically sought to preserve its freedom of action in international affairs, preferring unilateralist approaches to multilateralist ones. "The United States has never been isolated or outside the world's political struggles," LaFeber argues. "It was born in the middle of those struggles, and its great problem was -and has always been-how to survive those struggles while maintaining individual liberty at