The Contours of American History

"A very good book indeed.... It is quietly reasoned, beautifully ordered, and spirited as hell.... [It] is not a book for children, nostalgic or otherwise."—Loren Baritz, The Nation

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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.