Why The American Century

Argues that the United States' founding myths no longer apply, and explains why Americans must reconsider the facts of their history.

This examination of America during the twentieth century covers such areas as Victorian culture, modernism, poetry, visual arts, social science, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.

For a decade America’s share of the global economy has been in decline. Its diplomatic alliances are under immense strain, and any claim of moral leadership has been abandoned. America is still a colossus, possessing half the world’s manufacturing capacity, nearly half its military forces, and a formidable system of global surveillance and covert operations. But even at its peak it may have been sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Is it realistic to rely on the global order established after World War II, or are we witnessing the changing of the guard, with China emerging as the world’s economic and military powerhouse? America clings to its superpower status, but for how much longer?

In this extraordinary collection of writings, covering the period from 1878 to 1989, a wide range of Japanese visitors to the United States offer their vivid, and sometimes surprising perspectives on Americans and American society. Peter Duus and Kenji Hasegawa have selected essays and articles by Japanese from many walks of life: writers and academics, bureaucrats and priests, politicians and journalists, businessmen, philanthropists, artists. Their views often reflect power relations between America and Japan, particularly during the wartime and postwar periods, but all of them dealt with common themes—America’s origins, its ethnic diversity, its social conformity, its peculiar gender relations, its vast wealth, and its cultural arrogance—making clear that while Japanese observers often regarded the U.S. as a mentor, they rarely saw it as a role model.

This timely collection of essays offers one of the first serious efforts to assess the record of American foreign policy over the course of the twentieth century. The essays comprise the work of political scientists as well as historians, conservatives as well as liberals, foreign scholars as well as Americans. Taking off from Henry Luce's vision of an "American century," the authors discuss such important topics as the American conception of the national interest, the tension between democracy and capitalism, the U. S. role in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds, party politics and foreign policy, the significance of race in American foreign relations, and the cultural impact of American diplomacy on the world at large. The result is a lively collection of essays by authors who often disagree but who nonetheless provide the reader with keen insights about the past and provocative views of the future.

More than any other nation, the United States has shaped the course of world history during the twentieth century which has been called "the American century." In this absorbing and accessible book, a group of leading scholars of American history examine the century as a coherent whole, highlighting the continuities underlying the cyclical change and apparent diversity that have marked America's development since 1900.

What made Henry Kissinger the kind of diplomat he was? What experiences and influences shaped his worldview and provided the framework for his approach to international relations? Suri offers a thought-provoking, interpretive study of one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the twentieth century.