ABSTRACT
The response of American readers reflected weariness with the war, eagerness to prevent a recurrence. In the increasingly complex nation of the nineteenth century, the intellectual commitments to American involvement in the one world of which it was a part took various forms. Desertions from the faith in one world occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century among some intellectuals, who abandoned the belief in the unity of the human species. The American way would inevitably spread to neighboring areas and in diffusion grow increasingly attractive. Overseas commerce, on which much of the American economy had long rested, was by its nature cosmopolitan. The idea of one world also offered Americans a means of restating and preserving the patriotic connotations of earlier beliefs — in the freedom of the seas and in the manifest mission of a pilgrim people building a city upon the hill to redeem the world.
