Christopher McKnight Nichols

“Just what did isolationists think—and say—in the early twentieth century? Christopher Nichols provides some provocative answers to that question in Promise and Peril, which is far more intellectually venturesome than its textbookish title suggests. Nichols has written a rediscovery of the isolationist tradition, a thorough and timely account of thinkers as diverse as William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Eugene Debs and Jane Addams… Nichols has accomplished a major feat, demonstrating that isolationism was a far richer and more complex intellectual tradition than its critics have ever imagined—one that still speaks to our own time, freshening the stale formulas of the Washington consensus and allowing us to reimagine the role of the United States in the world.”—Jackson Lears, The Nation

“Christopher McKnight Nichols has written an outstanding intellectual history of isolationism… Nichols does an extraordinary job of conceptual exegesis… What is most fascinating about Promise and Peril is Nichols’ ability to communicate not only the intellectual and political contestation over ‘the meaning of America’ that occurred publicly, but also how this contestation occurred in the ‘hearts and minds’ of individuals as they struggled to integrate traditional ideas with novel circumstances.”—Jeffrey Meiser, New Global Studies

“This is an important book that broadens the context of turn-of-the-century isolationist thought and the domestic politics of American foreign relations. Most fundamentally, it demands that historians take isolationism more seriously than we have hitherto. Nichols provocatively prompts us to see it not as a limited and reactive political movement of 1919–20 or of the 1930s, but rather as a malleable and evolving intellectual and political tradition… Nichols has produced a very fine book that should reopen discussion of American isolationism. He deserves a round of applause. Promise and Peril should be widely read.”—Jay Sexton, Journal of American Studies

“This is a thoughtful and important contribution to the intellectual history of U.S. foreign relations and to scholarly understanding of the forces shaping a broader U.S. international engagement in the twentieth century.”—Ian Tyrrell, American Historical Review