Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations by Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (review)

One could reasonably ask whether, after only twelve years, we really need a third edition of Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. The answer, for a range of audiences, is yes. The book strikes a difficult balance between being accessible to students new to the field and offering value to regular attendees of the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). For those who already have the first or second edition, the third edition is worth adding to your shelf.

In many ways, the third edition of Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations will be familiar to readers of the first and second. After all, the contributors include eight former presidents of SHAFR. This new volume, however, expands considerably over the previous version, with 21 chapters as well as an introduction. The third edition includes six additional chapters and 140 more pages. Yet, with 373 pages of text, the volume is surprisingly concise.

Contributions on borders, international relations, psychology, ideology, national security, corporatism, borderlands, race, memory, and gender remain. Earlier chapters on modernization and cultural transfer have become development and nation branding respectively. On the other hand, nine new chapters join the volume; their themes and perspectives include political economy, computational methods, non-state actors, senses, emotion, legal history, domestic politics, religion, and exceptionalism. Furthermore, the backgrounds of the contributors reflect the diversification of the field.

In some respects, the editors' decision to add so many chapters and reframe others reflects the broadening and reconceptualization happening in much of the scholarship produced over the past decade or so. What is lost in the new volume, however, are two essays that defined the field and reflected on the practice of U.S. foreign relations history. Although many of the essay's authors outline the historiography relevant to their chapter, these are not historiographical reviews per se. But, the footnotes of each chapter are a gold mine for syllabi, comprehensive examination lists, and summer reading.

Making comparisons with the previous editions, I was surprised to discover that domestic politics had not previously warranted inclusion (the first edition includes an essay on public opinion and the first two editions include a contribution on bureaucratic politics, but Frederik Logevall's focus here is distinct from those earlier chapters). Logevall's essay warns us against treating the U.S. government as a "unitary actor" and instead to immerse ourselves in domestic sources of foreign policy (p. 155).

The most radical addition may be the chapter by David Allen and Matthew Connelly, which proposes that historians of U.S. foreign relations undertake new types of research—particularly through computational methods such as traffic analysis, topic modeling, network analysis, and mapping, to name a few. Anyone beginning a new project or advising student research will benefit from the comprehensible introduction they offer. In addition to describing new methodologies and the benefits they might yield, Allen and Connelly also offer caution about unsophisticated analysis and pitfalls that researchers could face when using such methods for the first time.

Many of the chapters new to the third edition, such as Nathan J. Citino's, introduce readers to related fields in history or other disciplines that could be beneficial to those writing on U.S. foreign relations. One of the main advantages of the comparative and frontier-borderlands approaches outlined by Citino would be history that treated the United States as less exceptional. Ussama Makdisi warns even more forcefully that scholarship emphasizing transnational approaches or locating itself within the field of "the United States and the world" risks being just as exceptionalist as earlier approaches to the role of the United States internationally. In contrast to the tone of much of the volume, Makdisi stridently argues that much progress remains to be made in internationalizing and contextualizing the writing of U.S. foreign relations history.

Readers questioning the need for separate chapters on senses, emotions, and psychology...