Overview

Foreign policies and diplomatic missions, combined with military action, were the driving forces behind the growth of the early United States. In an era when the Old and New Worlds were subject to British, French, and Spanish imperial ambitions, the new republic had limited diplomatic presence and minimal public credit. It was vulnerable to hostile forces in every direction. The United States could not have survived, grown, or flourished without the adoption of prescient foreign policies, or without skillful diplomatic operations. An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history--such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay's advocacy of an American System, Pinckney's Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama--are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy. An Independent Empire tells the stories of the people who defined the early history of America's international relationships. Throughout the book are brief, entertaining vignettes of often-overlooked intellectuals, spies, diplomats, and statesmen whose actions and decisions shaped the first fifty years of the United States.

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Michael S. Kochin is professor extraordinarius in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. He received his AB in mathematics at nineteen from Harvard and his MA and PhD in political science from the University of Chicago. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, Claremont McKenna College, and the Catholic University of America. He has written widely on the comparative analysis of institutions, political thought, politics and literature, and political rhetoric. Kochin is the author of Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Political Thought, Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art, and coauthor, with the historian Michael Taylor, of An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States. He is a thirtieth-degree Freemason and reigning First Principal of Holy City Royal Arch Chapter #3, Supreme Grand Royal Arch Chapter of Israel. Michael Taylor is a historian and coauthor, with Michael S. Kochin of An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States. Walter Dixon is a broadcast media veteran of more than twenty years' experience with a background in theater and performing arts and voice work for commercials. After a career in public radio, he is now a full-time narrator with more than fifty audiobooks recorded in genres ranging from religion and politics to children's stories.

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