From Isolation To War 1931 1941

The new edition of this popular and widely-used American history textbook has been thoroughly updated to include a wealth of new scholarship on American diplomacy in the decade leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Features new material on the Washington Conference of 1921-22, early American diplomacy in the Manchurian crisis, the Panay incident, Russia’s invasion of Finland, the destroyer-bases deal, and much more Pays particular attention to Roosevelt’s policies towards Jewish refugees, the battle between domestic groups like the America First Committee and Fight for Freedom, and the Welles mission of 1940 Includes concise biographical sketches of major world leaders, including Hoover, FDR, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Tojo Outlines and examines the debates of historians over the wisdom of U.S. policies

Hill theorizes that the diplomatic community opened the European theater to a full-scale war on Germany because Hitler's pressure on his Japanese allies caused the Pearl Harbor attack.

This text covers the major events and historiographical controversies in American diplomacy in the years between the two world wars. Covered in detail are matters such as the background of US isolationism, Pacific diplomacy in the 1920s, the Manchurian Crisis, the Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, the neutrality acts, and the debate over intervention in 1939-41. New topics include the recognition of the Soviet Union, rejection of the World Court, the blocking of Jewish immigration, Munich, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the polemics of isolationist ideology. Also, an entire chapter that includes discussion of US/Japanese relations in the 1930s and a close consideration of the economic, political, and historical pressures that forced the island empire's decision to act. The book concludes with a delineation of revisionist arguments, including the Devil theory of FDR's culpability, and provides the insight of modern historians in a consideration of Roosevelt's leadership and the true focus of American diplomacy in the 1930s.