Bøker av Steven J. Brady

In Chained to History, Steven J. Brady places slavery at the center of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom. Chained to History shows how slavery was interwoven with America's foreign relations and affected policy controversies ranging from trade to extradition treaties to military alliances. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable.From the Age of Revolutions through the American Civil War, slavery was a constant factor in shaping US relations with the Atlantic World and beyond. Chained to History addresses this critical topic in its complete scope and shows the immoral practice of human bondage to have informed how the United States re-entered the community of nations after 1865.

In the early years of the Atlantic Alliance, no bilateral relationship was more important than that between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States. Even so, the West German-American alliance was taxing for both sides during much of the first two decades of the Cold War. Ultimately, despite frequent, significant challenges to the alliance from without and within, the two allies managed to achieve a positive and productive relationship - Eisenhower and Adenauer explains how they did so. In both capitals, the top foreign policy makers were deeply involved in the conduct of what they viewed as a vital bilateral alliance, with both President Dwight Eisenhower and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer taking the lead in his own government. For the Americans, a rearmed FRG tightly bound to the West was the bedrock of any European security policy that could contain the Soviet Union for the long-term. For the West German government, their relationship with the United States was the bedrock of rehabilitation and, indeed, survival as an independent country. In this book, their alliance is closely analyzed to form new knowledge on the West German-American relationship during the Cold War.