America and the postwar world: remaking international society, 1945-1956 (1st)

The main tide of international relations scholarship on the first years after World War II sweeps toward Cold War accounts.

These have emphasized the United States and USSR in a context of geopolitical rivalry, with concomitant attention upon the bristling security state.

Historians have also extensively analyzed the creation of an economic order (Bretton Woods), mainly designed by Americans and tailored to their interests, but resisted by peoples residing outside of North America, Western Europe, and Japan.

This scholarship, centered on the Cold War as vortex and a reconfigured world economy, is rife with contending schools of interpretation and, bolstered by troves of declassified archival documents, will support investigations and writing into the future.

By contrast, this book examines a past that ran concurrent with the Cold War and interacted with it.