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A “POLYGONAL” RELATIONSHIP: THEODORE ROOSEVELT, THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2016

John M. Thompson
John M. Thompson*
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
*
email: john.thompson@ucd.ie
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Extract

As Eric Hobsbawm recounts in his classic work, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, the final decades of the nineteenth century and the initial decades of the twentieth century were years of enormous change and activity across the globe. It was the apogee of imperialism for the West; mass, or at least more broadly based, democracy emerged in many countries; total wealth increased dramatically; technological changes greatly reduced travel times and facilitated rapid, even instantaneous, communication between states and continents, which, in turn, allowed the spread of mass culture in a way the world had never seen before. At the center of these events were the great powers of Europe—in particular Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary—and the United States. Indeed, the interaction between Europe's great powers and the United States drove much of the political, economic, cultural, and technological ferment that culminated in the First World War. No American played a more important role in this process than Theodore Roosevelt, and this special issue is devoted to exploring key facets of TR's, and by extension his country's, relationship with Europe.

Type
Forum: Theodore Roosevelt and Europe
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 102 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1994). See also Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: a Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), esp. 710–43.

2 Henry Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931), vii.

3 Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956); Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1896–1914 (London: Scribner, 1969); Raymond E. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and the International Rivalries (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1970); Manfred Jonas, The United States and Germany: a Diplomatic History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Nancy Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). A special issue of Diplomacy and Statecraft 19 (Dec. 2008)Google Scholar, featured several essays on TR and Europe.

4 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Donna Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

5 Hans Krabbendam and John M. Thompson, eds., America's Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the “Discovery” of Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 6.

6 Kramer, Paul A., “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88 (Mar. 2002): 1315–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On TR's imperialism, see David Burton, Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Ninkovich, Frank, “Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History 10 (Summer 1986): 221–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).

7 Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power; Perkins, The Great Rapprochement; William Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine: 1867–1907 (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1966); Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Simon Rofe, “Europe as the Nexus of Theodore Roosevelt's International Strategy” in America's Transatlantic Turn, eds. Krabbendam and Thompson, 179–96.

8 John M. Thompson, “Rethinking the Roosevelt Corollary: TR and the Politics of Foreign Policy,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, forthcoming, Dec. 2015; Thompson, “Constraint and Opportunity: Theodore Roosevelt, Transatlantic Relations and Domestic Politics” in America's Transatlantic Turn, eds. Krabbendam and Thompson, 51–64.

9 John A. Thompson, Woodrow Wilson (London: Routledge, 2002), 141–60.

10 Ernest R. May, Imperial Power: the Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 3–5.

11 Perkins, the Great Rapprochement, 13–30, 162–71, 187–92, 257–58; Richard D. Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1973), 28–29.

12 Sir Henry Mortimer Durand to Lord Lansdowne, Apr. 22, 1905, Foreign Office, General Correspondence before 1906, United States (FO 5 2579), National Archives, London.

13 The episode can be followed in the Political Archives of the German Foreign Office, Abteilung IA, May–Dec., 1902, R 17333, Lesesaal, Auswärtiges Amt, Kurstraße 36, Berlin,

14 Edward P. Kohn, “Pride and Prejudice: Theodore Roosevelt's Boyhood Contact with Europe” in America's Transatlantic Turn, eds. Krabbendam and Thompson, 22–25.

15 Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: the Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 97–119.

16 William Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Cudahy, 1961), 473–74.

17 O'Brien, Phillips Payson, “The American Press, Public, and the Reaction to the Outbreak of the First World War,” Diplomatic History 37 (June 2013): 446–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 John M. Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 330.