U.S. Foreign Relations from the 18th-Century to the Present
Current Projects
Into the Heart of Darkness: My Lai, a volume in the “Pivotal Moments in American History” series (Oxford University Press)
Theodore Roosevelt: Diplomat (Rowman and Littlefield)
Destiny at Sea: The Alabama Crisis During the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press)
Courses Taught
HY325/525: Rise of America to World Power (to 1898)
HY 326/526: U.S. as a World Power (1898-Present)
HY341/541: U.S.-Vietnam War
Awards and Honors
Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor, University of Alabama (1999).
Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award (1989).
Selected Publications
Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations, a volume in the “Littlefield History of the Civil War” series (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Lincoln Prize, Honorable Mention (2010)
The Bay of Pigs, a volume in the “Pivotal Moments in American History” series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
A Selection of:
The Book-of-the-Month Club
The History Book Club
The Military Book Club
The BOMC 2
Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations since 1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913, revised edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations from 1897, revised ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
One of Choice Magazine’s “Outstanding Academic Books” for 2003.
Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
“Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth.” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 923-939.
Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
With Donald A. Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo-American Relations in the 1840s (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1997).
One of Choice Magazine’s “Outstanding Academic Books” for 1997.
Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
History Book Club Selection
Winner of the Phi Alpha Theta Book Award.
With Randall B. Woods, Dawning of the Cold War: The United States’ Quest for Order (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
“A New Kind of War”: America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Editor, The Foreign and Domestic Dimensions of Modern Warfare: Vietnam, Central America, and Nuclear Strategy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988).
Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, revised, 1997).
A selection of:
The Book-of-the-Month Club
The History Book Club
The Quality Paperbacks Book Club
Also, used by Steven Spielberg as a key source for his film Amistad (1997).
To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1843 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1977).