The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000

Product Description

Americans often think of their nation’s history as a movement toward ever-greater democracy, equality, and freedom. Wars in this story are understood both as necessary to defend those values and as exceptions to the rule of peaceful progress. In
The Dominion of War, historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton boldly reinterpret the development of the United States, arguing instead that war has played a leading role in shaping North America from the sixteenth century to the present.
Anderson and Cayton bring their sweeping narrative to life by structuring it around the lives of eight men—Samuel de Champlain, William Penn, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and Colin Powell. This approach enables them to describe great events in concrete terms and to illuminate critical connections between often-forgotten imperial conflicts, such as the Seven Years’ War and the Mexican-American War, and better-known events such as the War of Independence and the Civil War. The result is a provocative, highly readable account of the ways in which republic and empire have coexisted in American history as two faces of the same coin. The Dominion of War recasts familiar triumphs as tragedies, proposes an unconventional set of turning points, and depicts imperialism and republicanism as inseparable influences in a pattern of development in which war and freedom have long been intertwined.   It offers a new perspective on America’s attempts to define its role in the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Review

“An imaginative retelling of American history from the point of view of empire and war by two very talented historians.” —
Gordon S. Wood, author of
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
“A must read… Anderson and Cayton take off the blinders and show us what the past is really like.” —Vine Deloria, Jr., author of Custer Died for Your Sins
“This sweeping reinterpretation places war and empire where they should be – not as exceptions to the American past, but as central to it, and therefore to the United States today.” —Michael Sherry, author of In the Shadows of War: The United States Since the 1930s
“The most important book ever written on the connection between war and American expansion.  It should be required reading for our political leaders today…” —Don Higginbotham, author of The War of American Independence
“History in an ironic key, timely and provocative.” —Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Fred Anderson is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of several books, including
Crucible of War, which won the Francis Parkman and Mark Lynton prizes.

Andrew Cayton, distinguished professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, is the author or editor of eight books, including Frontier Indiana and Ohio: The History of a People.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A View in Winter
The Mall in Washington, D.C., is a good deal less inviting in January than in April, when the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin burst into bloom and tourists loiter in the sun. But because the ways in which the Mall and its monuments give meaning to the events of American history are clearest in the winter—and because the story we have to tell is in many ways a wintry tale—it may not be amiss for us to begin on the Mall with the trees bare and the skies gray, walking down the path that leads from the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam War Memorial. In spring, the transition between the two would be muted by the trees and plantings of Constitution Gardens. In winter, the contrast is stark and unmistakable.
Behind us, the majesty of the Lincoln Memorial leaves no doubt about the importance of the sixteenth president and the Union that he, more than anyone else, preserved. The steps that visitors must climb to enter the monument prepare them for what they find within: an immense, melancholy st