Detailing the imperial actions and beliefs of such revered figures as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the author creates an in-depth historical study of the American obsession with empire - a study essential to the understanding of the origins of current domestic and foreign undertakings.

William Appleman Williams was one of America s greatest critics of US imperialism. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961, reached back to seventeenth-century British history to argue that the relationship between liberalism and empire was in effect a grand compromise, with expansion abroad containing class and race tensions at home. Coming as it did before the political explosions of the 1960s, Williams s message was a deeply heretical one, and yet the Modern Library ultimately chose Contours as one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th Century."