Who wants to help me with my history essays?

Whoa. These aren’t essays, but major papers. My daughter did a version of #1 in high school (Semester 1 was from Amercian Rev to Civil War, Semester 2 was Civil War to Vietnam War) and each paper was 30 pages long. Isolationism to Imperialism.

There are some pretty good outlines on isolationism to imperialism. This should give you a good overview, and this has a sense of Interventionism.

The progression is isolationism>imperialism>interventionism. The emegence of the US as a global superpower led to interventionism. America’s ability to support interventionism has been waning.

Dude, I’m working on my thesis right now and it pretty much has a lot to do with #1.

For #2, it helps to think about American politics as a series of backlashes between the left and the right. This “culture war” bullshit is nothing new… it goes all the way back to the turn of the century. Look up Father Coughlin, for example. Anyhoo, back to backlashes, think about the entire political structure of the 20th century as a game of ping pong between so-called liberals and so-called conservatives.

You have the Progressive Movement before and during FDR’s administration, and then you have a more or less conservative backlash in the 50’s with anti-communism (reflected in foreign policy as well). And then there’s the hippies in the 60’s (who were much less political than most people think) but the conservatives were also gaining steam in the form of Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and such, and the backlash against LBJ’s Great Society…. and then Carter sucked, so the pendulum swung to the right again, and then people wound up voting for Reagan and Papa Bush, but then people got fed up with them and swung to the left again for Bill, but then got fed up again and he was forced to swing to the center, and then there was W, who pissed everyone off, so everyone swung to the left again, but then Obama pissed everyone off and now we are swinging back right…

Damn, I’m rambling… I can talk about any of this shit in crazy detail if you want me to. It’s sort of my specialty. I even have an essay about politics as a series of backlashes in the 60’s that I could send you to read, if it would help. Just lemme know.

@noelleptc, my thesis is basically about how the US Navy evolved to both influence and reflect changing theories of American foreign policy from the Revolution to the end of WWII, so I’m pretty well informed on the subject of your first essay option.

If I were you, I would start with a discussion on the Spanish-American War and our forays into Cuba the Philippines. Then, look up “big stick diplomacy” and the “Roosevelt Corollary” for more information. I would then talk about Woodrow Wilson’s campaign. A lot of Americans were fed up with American imperial exploits and isolationism was pretty popular. Wilson ran on a campaign of isolationism, but wound up breaking his promise by getting involved with Europe through our lend-lease program. Most Americans saw Europe as a huge clusterfuck of anarchism, socialism, and dying monarchies and just didn’t want to get involved, but we wound up adopting an interventionist policy anyway.
We were starting to get involved with containment of communism during this time. Look up the “Polar Bear Expedition” for more info about an interesting event related to this. Our involvement in WWII wasn’t really a question of foreign policy issues, in my mind. I see it as a “just” war, and our actions against Imperial Japan as self-defense. There were issues of alliances and such that you could get into…

If you want to cut the fat out of mid to late 20th century foreign policy, just look at it as a process of increasing interventionism. We went from a policy of “containment” for communism during the early 20th century through Korea, to a policy of outright aggression towards it in Vietnam….

Congrats!