100 Books Like Epic Encounters

In this absolutely fascinating read, Thomas deftly explodes the myth that the United States brought religious freedom to Japan during the post-World War II occupation. The first part of the book explores pre-war notions of religious freedom in both countries and the second part looks at the various misunderstandings that ensued as the United States sought to impose its conception of religious freedom on Japan. Thomas offers a skilled reading of religious culture in both countries and ably explains the outcomes of U.S. occupation policies.

Much of the focus in news media and the popular imagination about evangelicals and foreign policy centers on Israel, with many pundits and scholars alike emphasizing the centrality of apocalyptic end-times prophecies to the development of conservative Christian support for Israel. Hummel’s exceptionally researched and beautifully written book provides much-needed nuance to this often one-dimensional narrative. His careful reading of U.S. and Israeli sources sheds new light on the emergence of evangelical Christian Zionism after 1948 and its many permutations throughout the decades that followed. This is a crucial read for understanding the complexities and religious dynamics of modern U.S.-Israeli relations.

Although there is no shortage of books on the 28th president and his foreign policy—we even use “Wilsonian” as a shorthand for the embrace of idealism, liberal internationalism, and democratic capitalism in U.S. foreign relations—Burnidge’s work offers an exceptional exploration of how religion and religious ideas informed Wilson’s approach to world affairs. She sets her chronicle of Wilson’s life and spiritual development within the context of the broader religious history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and weaves in expert analysis of the relationship between Wilson’s Christianity, race, and racism in that era. This provides a compelling foundation for her discussion of the Protestant beliefs that shaped Wilsonian internationalism during World War I and beyond. Engrossing, revealing, and extraordinarily smart, this is a key book for those interested in Wilson, World War I, and the global Progressive Era, not to mention the underpinnings of liberal… show more.

This is a magisterial work and the perfect starting point for anyone interested in learning about how religious beliefs and religions of all types have played a role in U.S. foreign policy since the colonial era. It is an incredibly comprehensive and deeply researched book, but do not let its heft deter you—Preston is a skilled narrator and you will find yourself immediately immersed in and absorbed by the stories he shares. His ability to illuminate the links between religion and the core ideas that have guided the U.S. engagement with the world over the past four hundred years is a truly impressive achievement.

“Where are the women?” So goes this 1989 classic’s opening gambit.

We think politics is the domain of men, Enloe points out, but women have long been out there doing vital and often invisible work, whether as diplomats’ wives, sex workers recruited around US army bases, farmers, or labor leaders.

Bringing this gendered labor to the forefront of international relations is Enloe’s strength. She discusses how images of women “work,” as in the Chiquita Banana ads that introduced American housewives to this unusual fruit and helped expand United Fruit’s bloody empire, but also studies women’s transnational labor organizing.

Reading this book in graduate school guaranteed I would never think of those little stickers on bananas in the same way. Like many other historians of US foreign policy, I still assign sections from Enloe regularly, particularly in my “Transnational America” class. 

What makes this book so exceptional and ground-breaking decades after its publication is embedded in the subtitle: Kristin Hoganson argues that gender politics “provoked” the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, through which the United States acquired most of its overseas colonies.

Hoganson connects domestic and foreign policy, analyzing correspondence, political speeches, and newspaper articles. When jingoes – people we would know now call hawks – depicted Cuba as a beautiful damsel in distress or accused the war-averse president McKinley of having “no more backbone than a chocolate eclair,” they were counting on associations of manhood with militarism. Ultimately, they were successful in pushing the United States to war with Spain over Cuba and locking the country in a bloody quagmire in the Philippines.

I love this book because it never flinches from its focus on gender, intersecting with race and class. Transcending its temporal and geographic focus, it works as a… show more.

Naoko Shibusawa’s modern classic addresses a historical puzzle with huge repercussions: how did Americans go from viewing Japanese people as irredeemable enemies, to the point of justifying nuclear warfare and internment camps during World War II, to constructing them as vulnerable, willing, and dependable allies soon after Japan’s surrender?

Theories about “maturity” at the intersection of race and gender provide the answer. Despite its title, this book says little about the historical figure of the geisha – except in its use in postwar American cartoons that reimagined Japan as a compliant ward.

This monograph remains a huge inspiration for my work—I just love how deftly Shibusawa connects culture and politics. 

In the opening salvo of the second wave feminist movement in the West, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir memorably argued that men's gender often goes unnoticed, as if manhood were simply the neutral human condition.

Dean's book counters this common blind spot by demonstrating how the supposedly neutral categories of manhood, class privilege, and whiteness have significantly shaped US foreign policy. Specifically, he examines how a homogeneous group of upper-class white men led to disastrous US policy decisions in Vietnam.

These policymakers, raised in exclusive boarding schools, men's clubs, and military hierarchies that excluded women and people of color, used gendered and sexualized metaphors to justify policies that contradicted their claims to rational pragmatism. They also orchestrated the "lavender scare"—purging non-heterosexual Americans from government during McCarthyism.

This book reminds me that every analysis of US foreign policy should pay attention to who is making the decisions. Positionality matters.

Under what conditions will Americans support a president when he sends the nation to war? By looking at how the American public responded to the Korean and Vietnam wars in unprecedented breadth and depth, this is the question Mueller seeks to answer in arguably the most important book of the past half-century (or more) on American public opinion regarding war. This was one of the books that first got me interested in understanding why Americans respond the way they do to military conflicts, how presidential leadership, good and bad, can influence public support when American troops are in harm’s way.

This is my go-to reference book about American public opinion on all things foreign policy. Holsti is one of the most important public opinion scholars of the 20th Century and arguably this is his most important book. I assign it in all of my undergraduate classes on the subject. He explains not only what the public believes about foreign policy—through case studies ranging from international trade to all major U.S. military conflicts in the post-World War II era—but also does a brilliant job of synthesizing decades of research on human information processing, learning, and ideological reasoning to explain in straightforward terms why people react to events the way they do. He also explains the (substantial) differences between the foreign policy views of elites and average citizens