Much has changed since the publication of the first edition of Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations in 1991. While the Cold War, the focus of most of the scholarship in the field, was winding down, the field of foreign relations history seemed under attack. “We have been told again and again,” the very first sentence of the volume noted in an injured tone, that foreign relations history “is a backwater of scholarly inquiry.” Critics assailed the field for being ethnocentric, “short on synthesis, and desperately in need of new directions.” Editors Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson pushed back by bringing together essays demonstrating that foreign relations history was already pursuing new topics and methodologies. The innovations mostly had to do with integrating approaches borrowed from political science, such as bureaucratic politics and world systems analysis. Although the cultural and linguistic turns were already sweeping through other fields of history and other disciplines in the humanities, such post-modern concepts remained largely absent from the first edition, aside from Emily S. Rosenberg's pioneering chapter “Walking the Borders.”

By the time the second edition appeared in 2004, foreign relations history had caught up with the changes transforming the larger historical profession. The bottom-up approach of social history popularized in the 1960s–1970s and the emphasis on meaning and representation stressed in the cultural history arising in the 1980s–1990s were reflected in new chapters on how gender, race, memory, culture, and post-modern theory offered useful approaches to foreign relations history. The focus on the Cold War faded somewhat as historians explored other time periods and approached even the 1945–91 era with new questions, such as how did issues develop between North and South, and what commonalities were shared by the modernization projects of Washington and Moscow? The second edition carried forward Explaining's “big-tent,” inclusive tradition by featuring ever-important approaches, such as national security, ideology, and political economy.

This third edition demonstrates that the ever more diverse field of foreign relations history (now also called international history or the history of the United States in the world) has surged to the forefront of methodological innovation while retaining its solid grounding in the analysis of political, economic, cultural, and military power in world affairs.