William Earl Weeks

This is the story of a man, a treaty, and a nation. The man was John Quincy Adams, regarded by most historians as America's greatest secretary of state. The treaty was the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, of which Adams was the architect. It acquired Florida for the young United States, secured a western boundary extending to the Pacific, and bolstered the nation's position internationally. As William Weeks persuasively argues, the document also represented the first determined step in the creation of an American global empire.Weeks follows the course of the often labyrinthine negotiations by which Adams wrested the treaty from a recalcitrant Spain. The task required all of Adams's skill in diplomacy, for he faced a tangled skein of domestic and international controversies when he became secretary of state in 1817. The final document provided the United States commercial access to the Orient―a major objective of the Monroe administration that paved the way for the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.Adams, the son of a president and later himself president, saw himself as destined to play a crucial role in the growth and development of the United States. In this he succeeded. Yet his legendary statecraft proved bittersweet. Adams came to repudiate the slave society whose interests he had served by acquiring Florida, he was disgusted by the rapacity of the Jacksonians, and he experienced profound guilt over his own moral transgressions while secretary of state. In the end, Adams understood that great virtue cannot coexist with great power.Weeks's book, drawn in part from articles that won the Stuart Bernath Prize, makes a lasting contribution to our understanding of American foreign policy and adds significantly to our picture of one of the nation's most important statesmen.

In this fresh survey of foreign relations in the early years of the American republic, William Earl Weeks argues that the construction of the new nation went hand in hand with the building of the American empire. Mr. Weeks traces the origins of this initiative to the 1750s, when the Founding Fathers began to perceive the advantages of colonial union and the possibility of creating an empire within the British Empire that would provide security and the potential for commercial and territorial expansion. After the adoption of the Constitution—and a far stronger central government than had been popularly imagined—the need to expand combined with a messianic American nationalism. The result was aggressive diplomacy by successive presidential administrations. From the acquisition of Louisiana and Florida to the Mexican War, from the Monroe Doctrine to the annexation of Texas, Mr. Weeks describes the ideology and scope of American expansion in what has become known as the age of Manifest Destiny. Relations with Great Britain, France, and Spain; the role of missionaries, technology, and the federal government; and the issue of slavery are key elements in this succinct and thoughtful view of the making of the continental nation.

Since their first publication, the four volumes of the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations have served as the definitive source for the topic, from the colonial period to the Cold War. This entirely new first volume narrates the British North American colonists' pre-existing desire for expansion, security and prosperity and argues that these desires are both the essence of American foreign relations and the root cause for the creation of the United States. They required the colonists to unite politically, as individual colonies could not dominate North America by themselves. Although ingrained localist sentiments persisted, a strong, durable Union was required for mutual success, thus American nationalism was founded on the idea of allegiance to the Union. Continued tension between the desire for expansion and the fragility of the Union eventually resulted in the Union's collapse and the Civil War.

Since their first publication, the four volumes of the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations have served as the definitive source for the topic, from the colonial period to the Cold War. The first volume proposes that the British North American colonists' preexisting desire for expansion, security, and prosperity is both the essence of American foreign relations and the root cause for the creation of the United States. The second volume describes the dynamics of United States foreign policy from 1865 to 1913, the era when the United States became one of the four great world powers and the world's greatest economic power. The third volume describes how the United States became a global power – economically, culturally, and militarily – during the period from 1913 to 1945, from the inception of Woodrow Wilson's presidency to the end of the Second World War. The revised and expanded fourth volume explores the conditions in the international system at the end of World War II, the American determination to provide leadership, and the security dilemma each superpower posed for the other, while incorporating recent scholarship and revelations, and carrying the narrative into the Barack Obama's administration.

BY Weeks, William Earl ( Author ) [{ The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations (New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations) By Weeks, William Earl ( Author ) Feb - 28- 2013 ( Hardcover ) } ]