American Isolationism Between the World Wars: The Search for a Nation's Identity examines the theory of isolationism in America between the world wars, arguing that it is an ideal that has dominated the Republic since its founding. During the interwar period, isolationists could be found among Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Protestants, pacifists and militarists, rich and poor. While the dominant historical assessment of isolationism - that it was "provincial" and "short-sighted" - will be examined, this book argues that American isolationism between 1919 and the mid-1930s was a rational foreign policy simply because the European reversion back to politics as usual insured that the continent would remain unstable. Drawing on a wide range of newspaper and journal articles, biographies, congressional hearings, personal papers, and numerous secondary sources, Kenneth D. Rose suggests the time has come for a paradigm shift in how American isolationism is viewed. The text also offers a reflection on isolationism since the end of World War II, particularly the nature of isolationism during the Trump era. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. Foreign Relations and twentieth-century American history.

American Isolationism Between the World Wars: The Search for a Nation's Identity examines the theory of isolationism in America between the world wars, arguing that it is an ideal that has dominated the Republic since its founding. During the interwar period, isolationists could be found among Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Protestants, pacifists and militarists, rich and poor. While the dominant historical assessment of isolationism - that it was "provincial" and "short-sighted" - will be examined, this book argues that American isolationism between 1919 and the mid-1930s was a rational foreign policy simply because the European reversion back to politics as usual insured that the continent would remain unstable. Drawing on a wide range of newspaper and journal articles, biographies, congressional hearings, personal papers, and numerous secondary sources, Kenneth D. Rose suggests the time has come for a paradigm shift in how American isolationism is viewed. The text also offers a reflection on isolationism since the end of World War II, particularly the nature of isolationism during the Trump era. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. Foreign Relations and twentieth-century American history.

The late nineteenth century was a golden age for European travel in the United States. For prosperous Europeans, a journey to America was a fresh alternative to the more familiar 'Grand Tour' of their own continent, promising encounters with a vast, wild landscape, and with people whose culture was similar enough to their own to be intelligible, yet different enough to be interesting. Their observations of America and its inhabitants provide a striking lens on this era of American history, and a fascinating glimpse into how the people of the past perceived one another. In Unspeakable Awfulness, Kenneth D. Rose gathers together a broad selection of the observations made by European travellers to the United States. European visitors remarked upon what they saw as a distinctly American approach to everything from class, politics, and race to language, food, and advertising. Their assessments of the 'American character' continue to echo today, and create a full portrait of late-nineteenth century America as seen through the eyes of its visitors. Including vivid travellers' tales and plentiful illustrations, Unspeakable Awfulness is a rich resource that will be useful to students and appeal to anyone interested in travel history and narratives.

The late nineteenth century was a golden age for European travel in the United States. For prosperous Europeans, a journey to America was a fresh alternative to the more familiar 'Grand Tour' of their own continent, promising encounters with a vast, wild landscape, and with people whose culture was similar enough to their own to be intelligible, yet different enough to be interesting. Their observations of America and its inhabitants provide a striking lens on this era of American history, and a fascinating glimpse into how the people of the past perceived one another. In Unspeakable Awfulness, Kenneth D. Rose gathers together a broad selection of the observations made by European travellers to the United States. European visitors remarked upon what they saw as a distinctly American approach to everything from class, politics, and race to language, food, and advertising. Their assessments of the 'American character' continue to echo today, and create a full portrait of late-nineteenth century America as seen through the eyes of its visitors. Including vivid travellers' tales and plentiful illustrations, Unspeakable Awfulness is a rich resource that will be useful to students and appeal to anyone interested in travel history and narratives.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"Useful, insightful, and finely balanced. . . . Of the many books on the Prohibition, Rose's is among the best."
--W. J. Rorabaugh
"Pacific Northwest Quarterly"

"Though neglected by historians, the prohibition-repeal movement loomed large in U.S. politics in the late twenties and early thirties. In this very readable and well-researched study, Kenneth Rose explores the roles of women's organizations in this struggle. In the process he restores some once-influential women to their rightful place; challenges some widely held assumptions; and reminds us that women's history, like all history, can surprise us by its rich diversity and unexpected twists."
--Paul Boyer
University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Rose forcefully demonstrates that in the debate over the repeal of prohibition many of the women involved (notwithstanding marked differences in class, religion, or party affiliation) shared a common moral vision based on the protection of the American home. With commendable intellectual integrity, he refuses to rest with the simplified conclusions some scholars resort to in order to make an attractive and politically tidy case for 'their kind of woman.'"
--Martha Banta
University of California, Los Angeles

"Rose writes with relish and humor and contributes an important set of insights to the American experience with Prohibition, an experiment that still haunts the country over sixty years after Repeal."
--Robert E. Burke
Professor Emeritus of History
University of Wisconsin

"Unique in [its] emphasis on the role of women's organizations in both prohibition and repeal, and how the arguments used bywomen's organizations to promote the Eighteenth Amendment in 1923 were used by opponents to repeal it in 1933. . . . The author is dedicated to recovering the history of politically conservative women who have been traditionally ignored or dismissed in other historical studies.
--"Book News"

In 1933 Americans did something they had never done before: they voted to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, which for 13 years had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, was nullified by the passage of another amendment, the Twenty-First. Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. One factor that was essential, Kenneth D. Rose here argues, was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal.

Even more remarkable than the appearance of these women on the political scene was the approach they took to the politics of repeal. Intriguingly, the arguments employed by repeal women and by prohibition women were often mirror images of each other, even though the women on the two sides of the issue pursued diametrically opposed political agendas. Rose contends that a distinguishing feature of the women's repeal movement was an argument for home protection, a social feminist ideology that women repealists shared with the prohibitionist women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The book surveys the women's movement to repeal national prohibition and places it within the contexts of women's temperance activity, women's political activity during the 1920s, and the campaign for repeal.

While recent years have seen much-needed attention devoted to the recovery of women's history, conservative womenhave too often been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or written off as unworthy of scrutiny. With American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, Kenneth Rose fleshes out a crucial chapter in the history of American women and culture.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"Useful, insightful, and finely balanced. . . . Of the many books on the Prohibition, Rose's is among the best."
--W. J. Rorabaugh
"Pacific Northwest Quarterly"

"Though neglected by historians, the prohibition-repeal movement loomed large in U.S. politics in the late twenties and early thirties. In this very readable and well-researched study, Kenneth Rose explores the roles of women's organizations in this struggle. In the process he restores some once-influential women to their rightful place; challenges some widely held assumptions; and reminds us that women's history, like all history, can surprise us by its rich diversity and unexpected twists."
--Paul Boyer
University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Rose forcefully demonstrates that in the debate over the repeal of prohibition many of the women involved (notwithstanding marked differences in class, religion, or party affiliation) shared a common moral vision based on the protection of the American home. With commendable intellectual integrity, he refuses to rest with the simplified conclusions some scholars resort to in order to make an attractive and politically tidy case for 'their kind of woman.'"
--Martha Banta
University of California, Los Angeles

"Rose writes with relish and humor and contributes an important set of insights to the American experience with Prohibition, an experiment that still haunts the country over sixty years after Repeal."
--Robert E. Burke
Professor Emeritus of History
University of Wisconsin

"Unique in [its] emphasis on the role of women's organizations in both prohibition and repeal, and how the arguments used bywomen's organizations to promote the Eighteenth Amendment in 1923 were used by opponents to repeal it in 1933. . . . The author is dedicated to recovering the history of politically conservative women who have been traditionally ignored or dismissed in other historical studies.
--"Book News"

In 1933 Americans did something they had never done before: they voted to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, which for 13 years had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, was nullified by the passage of another amendment, the Twenty-First. Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. One factor that was essential, Kenneth D. Rose here argues, was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal.

Even more remarkable than the appearance of these women on the political scene was the approach they took to the politics of repeal. Intriguingly, the arguments employed by repeal women and by prohibition women were often mirror images of each other, even though the women on the two sides of the issue pursued diametrically opposed political agendas. Rose contends that a distinguishing feature of the women's repeal movement was an argument for home protection, a social feminist ideology that women repealists shared with the prohibitionist women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The book surveys the women's movement to repeal national prohibition and places it within the contexts of women's temperance activity, women's political activity during the 1920s, and the campaign for repeal.

While recent years have seen much-needed attention devoted to the recovery of women's history, conservative womenhave too often been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or written off as unworthy of scrutiny. With American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, Kenneth Rose fleshes out a crucial chapter in the history of American women and culture.

"Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground explores U.S. nuclear history from the bottom up--literally. . . . Rose deserves credit for not trivializing this period of our history, as so many retrospectives of the Cold War era have tended to do."
--"Journal of Cold War Studies"

"Important . . . One Nation Underground is an elegant account of the issues involved in the nuclear age."
--"Pacific Northwest Quarterly"

"This is a fine compilation of a massive amount of research, well founded in the existing literature, and presented in a readable narrative."
--"Journal of Illinois History"

"A readable short history of the fallout shelters and the broader political debate over civil defense. . . . Mr. Rose is a good storyteller, and One Nation Underground is engagingly writen, with an array of evocative photgraphs."
--"The Wall Street Journal"

"Rose writes well, with a good eye for the telling phrase and revealing example."--"Journal of Social History"

For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy--"to dig or not to dig," as "Business Week" put it at the time--forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being.

Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing theways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war?

Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail--including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon--One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

"Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground explores U.S. nuclear history from the bottom up--literally. . . . Rose deserves credit for not trivializing this period of our history, as so many retrospectives of the Cold War era have tended to do."
--"Journal of Cold War Studies"

"Important . . . One Nation Underground is an elegant account of the issues involved in the nuclear age."
--"Pacific Northwest Quarterly"

"This is a fine compilation of a massive amount of research, well founded in the existing literature, and presented in a readable narrative."
--"Journal of Illinois History"

"A readable short history of the fallout shelters and the broader political debate over civil defense. . . . Mr. Rose is a good storyteller, and One Nation Underground is engagingly writen, with an array of evocative photgraphs."
--"The Wall Street Journal"

"Rose writes well, with a good eye for the telling phrase and revealing example."--"Journal of Social History"

For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy--"to dig or not to dig," as "Business Week" put it at the time--forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being.

Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing theways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war?

Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail--including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon--One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.