"A very good book indeed.... It is quietly reasoned, beautifully ordered, and spirited as hell.... [It] is not a book for children, nostalgic or otherwise."—Loren Baritz, The Nation William Appleman Williams was the American history profession’s greatest critic of US imperialism. The Contours of American History , first published in 1961, reached back into British history to argue that the relationship between liberalism and empire was in effect a grand compromise, with expansion abroad...