The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation in print. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize-winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of prestigious Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. From Colony to Superpower is the only thematic volume commissioned for the series. Here George C. Herring uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America's dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world's greatest superpower.
A sweeping account of United States' foreign relations and diplomacy, this magisterial volume documents America's interaction with other peoples and nations of the world. Herring tells a story of stunning successes and sometimes tragic failures, captured in a fast-paced narrative that illuminates the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation, and highlights its ongoing impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. He shows how policymakers defined American interests broadly to include territorial expansion, access to growing markets, and the spread of an "American way" of life. And Herring does all this in a story rich in human drama and filled with epic events. Statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman and Dean Acheson played key roles in America's rise to world power. But America's expansion as a nation also owes much to the adventurers and explorers, the sea captains, merchants and captains of industry, the missionaries and diplomats, who discovered or charted new lands, developed new avenues of commerce, and established and defended the nation's interests in foreign lands.
From the American Revolution to the fifty-year struggle with communism and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, From Colony to Superpower tells the dramatic story of America's emergence as superpower--its birth in revolution, its troubled present, and its uncertain future.

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, among other books.

Maps
Editor's Introduction
Introduction
1. "To Begin the World Over Again": Foreign Policy and the Birth of the Republic, 1776-1778
2. "None Who Can Make Us Afraid": The New Republic in a Hostile World, 1789-1801
3. "Purified as by Fire": Republicanism Imperiled and Reaffirmed, 1801-1815
4. "Leave the Rest to Us": The Assertive Republic, 1815-1837
5. A Dose of Arsenic: Slavery, Expansion, and the Road to Disunion, 1837-1861
6. "Last Best Hope": The Union, the Confederacy, and Civil War Diplomacy, 1861-1877
7. "A Good Enough England": Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age, 1877-1893
8. The War of 1898, the New Empire, and the Dawn of the American Century, 1893-1901
9. "Bursting with Good Intentions": The United States in World Affairs, 1901-1913
10. "A New Age": Wilson, the Great War, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1913-1921
11. Involvement Without Commitment, 1921-1931
12. The Great Transformation: Depression, Isolationism, and War, 1931-1941
13. "Five Continents and Seven Seas": World War II and the Rise of American Globalism, 1941-1945
14. "A Novel Burden Far from Our Shores:" Truman, the Cold War, and the Revolution in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945-1953
15. Coexistence and Crises, 1953-1961
16. Gulliver's Troubles: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Limits of Power, 1961-1968
17. Nixon, Kissinger, and the End of the Postwar Era, 1969-1974
18. Foreign Policy in an Age of Dissonance, 1974-1981
19. "A Unique and Extraordinary Moment": Gorbachev, Reagan, Bush, and the End of the Cold War, 1981-1991
20. "The Strength of a Giant": America as Hyperpower, 1992-2007
Bibliographical Essay
Index