American Foreign Relations from the Early Republic to World War I

This seminar traces how the United States built its approach to the world from the Constitution through World War I, wrestling with the tensions between exceptionalism and expansionism, isolation and intervention, anti-colonial rhetoric and continental conquest. You'll work primarily through Perkins and LaFeber alongside primary sources, with the heavy lifting happening in your own research papers and an oral presentation rather than lectures. As a graduate seminar, it gives historical depth to anyone studying twentieth-century U.S. power or diplomacy, showing that the assumptions shaping later American foreign policy were already being argued out in the 1790s.