Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year List Archives

American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea

A powerful dissection of a core American myth.

The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. […Learn More]

Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa

There are so many roadblocks in Central Africa that it is hard to find a road that does not have one. Based on research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR), Peer Schouten maps more than a thousand of these roadblocks to show how communities, rebels and state security forces forge resistance and power out of control over these narrow points of passage. […Learn More]

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler

As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail extolled Hitler’s leadership and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler’s victims on the continent. […Learn More]

The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR

How did a socialist society, ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle, reconcile itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war? In this provocative new history, Jonathan Brunstedt pursues this question through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II – arguably the central defining event of the Soviet epoch […Learn More]

Lincoln and the Fight for Peace

A groundbreaking, revelatory history of Abraham Lincoln’s plan to secure a just and lasting peace after the Civil War—a vision that inspired future presidents as well as the world’s most famous peacemakers, including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a story of war and peace, race and reconciliation. […Learn More]

Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas

A bold new history of the origins and aftermath of the Texas Revolution, revealing how Indians, Mexicans, and Americans battled for survival in one of the continent’s most diverse regions […Learn More]

Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution

New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon S. Wood elucidates the debates over the founding documents of the United States.

The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. […Learn More]

Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union

An essential exploration of how authoritarian regimes operate at the local level

How do local leaders govern in a large dictatorship? What resources do they draw on? Building on recent innovations in the theory of dictatorship, Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk examine these questions by looking at one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. […Learn More]

Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East

Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade―in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have likewise been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation. What is common to all the operations, however, is that they failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended and even catastrophic consequences, carried heavy financial and human costs, and in many cases left the countries in question worse off than they were before. […Learn More]

Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes

How do some dictatorships become institutionalized ruled-based systems, while others remain heavily personalist? Once implemented, do executive constraints actually play an effective role in promoting autocratic stability? To understand patterns of regime institutionalization, this book studies the emergence of constitutional term limits and succession procedures, as well as elite power-sharing within presidential cabinets. […Learn More]