In his last years as president of the United States, an embattled George Washington yearned for a time when his nation would have "the strength of a Giant and there will be none who can make us afraid." At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised to achieve a position of world power beyond what even Washington could have imagined.
In The American Century and Beyond: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1893-2014, the second volume of a new split paperback edition of the award-winning From Colony to Superpower, George C. Herring recounts the rise of the United States from the dawn of what came to be known as the American Century. This fast-paced narrative tells a story of stunning successes and tragic failures, illuminating the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation. Herring shows how policymakers defined American interests broadly to include territorial expansion, access to growing markets, and the spread of the "American way of life." He recounts the United States' domination of the Caribbean and Pacific, its decisive involvement in two world wars, and the eventual victory in the half-century Cold War that left it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world's lone superpower.
But the unipolar moment turned out to be stunningly brief. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the emergence of nations such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China have left the United States in a position that is uncertain at best. A new chapter brings Herring's sweeping narrative up through the Global War on Terror to the present.

George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. A leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, he is the former editor of Diplomatic History and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 and LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War, among other books.

Introduction
1. The War of 1898 and the Dawn of the American Century, 1893-190119. "Bursting with Good Intentions": The United States in World Affairs, 1901-1913
2. "A New Age": Wilson, the Great War, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1913-1921
3. Involvement Without Commitment, 1921-1931
4. The Great Transformation: Depression, Isolationism, and War, 1931-1941
5. "Five Continents and Seven Seas": World War II and the Emergence of American Globalism, 1941-1945
6. "A Noble Burden Far From Our Shores": Truman, the Cold War, and the Revolution in American Foreign Policy, 1945-1953
7. Coexistence and Crises, 1953-1961
8. Gulliver's Troubles: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Limits of Power, 1961-1969
9. Nixon, Kissinger, and the End of the Postwar Era, 1969-1974
10. Foreign Policy in an Age of Dissonance, 1974-1981
11. "A Unique and Extraordinary Time in World History": Gorbachev, Reagan, Bush, and the End of the Cold War, 1981-1991
12. The Strength of a Giant: America as Hyperpower, 1992-2001
13. From 9/11 to the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001-2013
Epilogue
Bibiliographic Essay