Following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the November 1864 presidential election, some Confederates performed what Jason Phillips has described as “somersaults of reasoning” to convince themselves that this outcome was not a blow to their hopes of independence. That summer, rumor had traveled around Confederate army camps and in correspondence home that the North was beset by disaffection and that success for the Democratic Party in the election would bring peace. These assumptions were challenged when the Democratic candidate George McClellan announced his war policy and seriously compromised when Lincoln’s reelection was confirmed. Facing this situation, a good few Confederate diehards slipped into the realms of the far-fetched to maintain their belief that peace and independence remained within their grasp; some, for instance, claimed that more states were now sure to secede and further fracture the Union. B. P. Alston, writing from his camp near Richmond, joined in with such questionable reasoning.

Scholarship on the gendered dimensions of US foreign relations flourished in the twenty years following the appearance in 1986 of Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of History Analysis.” But a worrisome drop-off in the last decade or so merits a reminder that gender matters and that we have good tools for integrating gender analysis in our work. This chapter encourages historians of US foreign relations to pay careful attention to the types of sources we use and the questions we ask of them; the assumptions and stereotypes that permeate diplomatic interactions; the ways in which gender helps create, maintain, and justify hierarchies of power; and the role of sex and sexuality in shaping relations between the United States and the world.

Building an empire demands more than political will, abundant wealth, and military might. It also requires a tremendous amount of stuff. This chapter considers the ways that materials and material have been essential to the consolidation of US power and influence in the postwar world. It explains why and how materiality should be considered a utensil in the historian’s toolbox, helping find and tell the richest stories possible.

What is the status and practice of US foreign relations history in China? The author observes that scholars in the field have not experienced the kind of self-examination and self-criticism that American (and other) scholars undertook during the 1980s and 1990s. Although Chinese historians today participate in global historiographical trends, the field, in his view, remains too much in a neopositivist mode.

This chapter examines the assumptions, concepts, and narratives historians use to study US relations with the natural world: with biological and chemical agents, environmental and physical phenomena, natural resources, and plants, animals, and microbes. Looking beyond the experiences and activities of human beings, it asks how non-human actors and forces can help explain the history of foreign relations. It surveys some of the key medical, scientific, and environmental issues that have shaped the history of foreign policy and international affairs, with an eye toward the methods scholars can employ to analyze these topics most profitably. Although studying these subjects can present methodological challenges, this chapter offers tools and strategies for overcoming those potential roadblocks. Becoming more attuned to medical, scientific, and environmental topics, as the chapter shows, challenges our assumptions about foreign relations in productive ways, offering fresh perspectives on conventional narratives and novel ways of studying the past.

When James H. Saye, a Presbyterian minister based in the South Carolina upcountry, wrote to a creditor in late November 1863 to discuss the settlement of a debt, it should have been a simple matter. He had recently received payment on a different note, and he wanted to use these funds to settle what he owed the addressee. It is hard to think of anything more straightforward. The problem for Saye was that he had received payment in Confederate money, and he suspected that his correspondent would be reluctant to take it. His letter therefore ended up being more than a notice of his intention to settle a debt; it was a disquisition on Confederate currency and, more generally, the imperatives of Confederate nationalism.

This chapter introduces students of US foreign relations to the methods of studying religion in US diplomatic history. The challenges in thinking about (and with) religion might be divided into three general issues: how to understand the relationship between religion and historical causality; how to make sense of the ways that religion is embedded in supposedly secular forms and institutions; and, perhaps most importantly, how to define religion. Making sense of religion demands attention to all these issues, as well as a willingness to engage with nonstate actors and ideology. Perhaps most importantly, it demands diplomatic historians take seriously the religious language, institutions, and behaviors they encounter in the archive. After a brief historiographical overview of the religious turn in diplomatic history and the global turn in religious history, the chapter focuses on the key themes of secularism, humanitarianism, causality, and mapping. It ends with a discussion of how attention to religious studies scholarship can help attune diplomatic historians to new dimensions in our traditional archives.

This chapter provides practical guidance for using four types of digital resources: finding aids, digitized analog records, databases, and born-digital records. It points out a variety of potential pitfalls to consider, including searching finding aids in ways limited to the immediate and most obvious object of interest, compared to the benefits of wider searches based on a fuller understanding of bureaucratic structures and personnel. Effective use of the National Archives Catalog requires a full awareness of its limitations and how it can obfuscate relationships among various organizations and records. The discussion of digitized analog records describes various approaches, using as examples the online resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA, as well as the digitized microfilm of Department of State records by the National Archives. The World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers Data Files and the Disaster History Files are examples of traditional databases discussed. The Department of State Central Foreign Policy File for the years 1973–1979 is discussed in depth, including what is and is not online, how to effectively search the records, the use of P-Reels, and how to interpret the TAGS system. The chapter closes with suggestions on steps to take before visiting research institutions.

The treatment of North American Indigenous nations as domestic rather than foreign nations is deeply woven into the political-legal fabric of the United States. Even before the United States could exert any real authority in vast regions of Native North America, US officials fancifully defined the independent Indigenous nations whose territories they sought to expropriate as falling under the preeminent sovereignty of the United States. The customary exclusion of US–Indigenous relations from the history of American foreign relations reflected and reinforced this imperial project. Of course, Indigenous nations were, and are, sovereign peoples. This chapter provides a roadmap for those endeavoring to narrate histories that more accurately reflect the nation-to-nation dynamics of US–Indigenous relations. Drawing on the work of Native American and borderlands historians, along with those of Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars more broadly, it offers guidance on how to engage with frameworks such as settler colonialism and methodologies such as ethnohistory to contribute to building a critical and ethical body of work that explicitly frames US–Indigenous relations as international rather than domestic history.

This chapter explores the debate about the post-1890s expansion of the United States. Taking as a starting point the creation of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in the 1960s, the chapter suggests that the Left has shaped our field’s discourse since that transformative decade. What constitutes and orients this intellectual movement has, however, changed over time: from the New Left, to the Cultural Left, to the Millennial Left. None of these three organic traditions regarded itself as a rigid School of Thought. Nevertheless, these three manifestations denaturalized, in turn, capitalism, nationalism, and liberalism by presenting each “-ism” as a synonym for US imperial power. Collectively, these three Left Turns have inspired field-defining debates about military power, free trade, cultural hegemony, and legal exception. The discussions have shaped the questions, methodologies, and interpretive tendencies of US foreign relations history. Rather than judging the cumulative effects of this six-decade debate, this chapter illuminates its often unappreciated genealogy. Hopefully, thinking historically about the historiography of US foreign relations history can suggest generative vistas for the future.

This chapter explores how capitalism has shaped US global power, and how US foreign policy has shaped the trajectory of US capitalism. The approach departs from more well-examined questions, such as quantifying how much capitalist motivations dictated foreign policy decisions, or interrogating whether US actions were determined by geopolitical calculations of realpolitik, versus ideological commitments to democracy, versus ambitions of expanding market share. Rather, beginning with an observation of the inextricability of the development of capitalism and the US as a nation, this chapter examines in what ways economic motivations, structures, and beliefs have appeared in US diplomacy; how centering capitalism shifts the definitions we have of terms like “US foreign relations” and “US global power”; and how this framework troubles concepts we might otherwise have left unexamined. This approach poses new methodological challenges: determining what scale(s) are most useful for studying capitalism; the problem of accessing private corporate archives; how to consider the role of the state in a study that places capitalism at its core; expanding the roster of actors in the history of US foreign relations; and considering how a focus on business and labor changes our understanding of the connections between US power abroad and at home.

This chapter examines the process of military mobilization in South Carolina during the initial months of the war. It probes what motivated men to volunteer for military service at this time and gives sustained consideration to flag presentations to volunteer units, public occasions that have been insufficiently appreciated by historians as important sites for the construction of Confederate nationalism at the local level. White women proved integral to the ritual and rhetoric surrounding these presentations, and so their role in the wider process and culture of mobilization is also analyzed. The final part of the chapter turns its attention to Federal forces establishing a vital foothold on South Carolina’s coast in late 1861 and, in particular, considers its consequences for the interior sections of the state. Federal success on the coast meant that the war had come a lot closer to home for those in the upcountry and this, when coupled with a growing realization that victory was likely to entail considerable sacrifice in terms of both blood and treasure, sowed the seeds for a more ardent national vision to emerge among some South Carolinians.

This chapter takes a dual approach to the subject of Confederate conscription. Its first half analyzes the policy from a political and intellectual perspective, positing that the expansion and tightening of conscription across the war reveals how an ardent strain of Confederate nationalism came to inform both policy and fundamental ideas about what it meant to be a citizen. As more and more men were called upon to enter southern armies and fight against an enemy that was increasingly willing to lay the hard hand of war upon the South, military service came to be interpreted as a fundamental obligation for able-bodied white men. The second half provides a more grassroots account of how conscription and exemption worked in the South Carolina upcountry. It argues that, while the exemption process was unquestionably influenced by class privilege as wealthy and well-connected South Carolinians could use their financial and social capital to evade military service in ways that their poorer neighbors simply could not, this did not cause a widespread rejection of the Confederacy.