Awkward Dominion - by Frank C Costigliola (Hardcover)

About the Book

In Awkward Dominion, Frank Costigliola offers a striking interpretation of the emergence of the United States as a world power in the 1920s, a period in which the country faced both burdens and opportunities as a result of the First World War...

Book Synopsis

In Awkward Dominion, Frank Costigliola offers a striking interpretation of the emergence of the United States as a world power in the 1920s, a period in which the country faced both burdens and opportunities as a result of the First World War. Exploring the key international issues in the interwar period--peace treaty revisions, Western economic recovery, and modernization--Costigliola considers American political and economic success in light of Europe's fascination with American technology, trade, and culture. The figures through which he tells this story include Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Henry Stimson, Charles Lindberg, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Ford.

Review Quotes

Costigliola's book is required reading for all serious students of American-European relations from Versailles to 1933.

The great virtue of this book--and Costigliola desrves congratulations for it-- is the intensive use and careful evaluation of new materials. It has intelligent, often acute comments about arms limitation, reparations, and the Kellogg-Briand pact.... This is a fine piece of research by a scholar from whom much will be heard.

This is a subtle and imaginative contribution to the increasingly accepted view that American foreign relations in the 1920s do not fit a clownish, isolationist stereotype. The author succeeds in going beyond the formal actions of governments to deal with the ambivalent response to American culture and economic power.

About the Author

Frank Costigliola teaches history at the University of Rhode Island.