Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Wars and Peace: The Future Americans Envisioned, 1861-1991. By David Mayers. (New York: St. Martin's, 1998. viii, 184 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-312-21352-2.) What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy. By H. W. Brands. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. x, 335 pp. Cloth, $54.95, isbn 0-521-63031-2. Paper, $17.95, isbn 0-521-63968-9.)

Here are two books by two intelligent authors analyzing what scores of other intelligent authors have written about current events from the Civil War to the 1990s. H. W. Brands and David Mayers explain a commonplace: Politicians, social observers, historians, and policy analysts are better at explaining the past than at predicting the future. But Brands and Mayers illuminate that thoroughly unexceptional idea with hundreds of engaging examples. Both authors have enormous breadth, and each wears his erudition lightly. Each book tells even the most learned historian of United States foreign relations something new and worthwhile about commentaries on the American role in the world in the years since 1861. . . .

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