US Involvement in WW2

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  eBook - ePub

  A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations

  Colonial Era to the Present

  • Christopher R. W. Dietrich(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Twenty U.S. Foreign Relations During World War II

  Andrew Johnstone

  The historiography of U.S. foreign relations during World War II is vast. For the United States, the war was one of the defining events of the twentieth century, altering its place and role in the world ever since. Given the significant changes that came with it, the war continues to attract public interest. This is in no small part because of the perception of it as a “good war” against evil, and the fact it is still in living memory. Scholarly interest has been further supported over the years by a huge amount of available source material in the form of documents and memoirs. And while most of that material may now be openly available, historians continue to revisit previously examined events and to use different approaches to assess seemingly well‐known historical issues. Historians have also found new ways of examining sources, events, and actors that might once have been deemed tangential or even irrelevant. As a result, the literature continues to grow, and even if the surge of interest that followed the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the war's end has passed, it shows no sign of stopping soon.1

  The writing of history is always affected by the era in which it is written, and that has certainly been the case with World War II. Much of the early literature on the war was deeply entwined with the debates over the origins of the Cold War, and there is no question that many later books and articles reflect the political climate in which they were produced. In the decades since the end of the Cold War, those heated political debates have started to fade, though they have not vanished completely. As Mark Stoler (2014 ) has pointed out, while World War II and the Cold War are still linked, the former is increasingly seen on its own terms. It is not, as was once feared by Warren F. Kimball (2001

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