HIST 542 American Foreign Relations From World War I to the Present

A graduate-level survey of how the United States went from a reluctant participant in great-power politics to the architect of the postwar international order, tracing the arc from Wilson through the Cold War and into the globalization era. You'll work through Iriye and Cohen alongside primary documents, give one substantial verbal presentation, and write three essays that push you to argue rather than summarize. The framing matters because most debates about American power today, alliances, interventions, retrenchment, are still arguments with this century, so the course doubles as background for IR, area studies, and anyone reading current foreign-policy writing critically.