ABSTRACT
The foreign policy of the United States between independence and World War I has attracted the attention of several generations of historians, each intent on relating that early era to the policy of their own time. At first historians saw a predestined, triumphal march toward world power by a virtuous people. Accounts shifted for a time to a decidedly less celebratory mode, stressing the lapse into national isolation and passivity after the heroic era of the struggle for independence. Long free-loaders, dependent on the British fleet for their security, Americans entered the twentieth century (so this version of the rise to world power went) unprepared for its challenges. Most recently, historians have drawn attention to the strains of arrogance and anxiety that ran through the first century and a half of American foreign relations. Oppression of native Americans, deceit and manipulation by political leaders, and a seemingly insatiable hunger for land and foreign markets top a long list of disagreeable features defining nineteenth-century expansion.1
