There was a time when war seemed an aberration in the American experience.
We were a peace-loving people, forced to fight for our independence, but able to
enjoy the long developmental years of the nineteenth century with only brief and
minor military interruptions (against Britain, Mexico, and Spain) and one unique
and unrepeatable Civil War. The first four decades of the twentieth century, as
well, gave us more years of peace than war. Then the epoch of world convulsion
caught up with the United States; and between 1940 and 1970 we have been in-
volved in major wars for at least fifteen of the thirty years, or half the time, and
we have endured numerous smaller engagements involving military activity and
American combat deaths. Seen from the 1970s, war and preparations for war are
the dominant pattern of American life. Given this perspective, it is not surprising
to find among historians a mounting interest in the origins of the two great wars
which did so much to militarize American history -- World War II and the Cold
War.

To historians writing shortly after these wars they seemed to be conflicts forced
upon America by certain aggressive nations that inexplicably erupt in violence,
reminding us how close barbarism runs beneath the surface of the older human
civilizations in Europe and Asia. But of late we have seen a strong revisionist cur-
rent, in which America's responsibility for these wars is the dominant theme. We
find revisionists arguing that America was involved in World War II and the
Cold War because she asserted her influence in very remote and unlikely parts of
the globe; that she came into conflict with the vital interests of large and ex-
pansionist nations, refused to yield, and was soon enmeshed in hostilities.
There are two broad explanations for what revisionists see as a pattern of the
overextension of American influence. One stresses the expansionism of American
capitalism, and the other condemns a national moralism which has made us disas-
trously rigid in foreign policy. The latter explanation has been the more per-
suasive, and it is expressed in two of the three essays reprinted below.

It is easy to understand why a strong revisionist impulse emerged in the 1960s.
In the first place, it was inevitable that historians would react eventually against
the sort of patriotic histories that had been written in the 1940s and early 1950s.
These studies depicted an innocent, passive, and almost pacifist America being
dragged into wars despite her strenuous efforts (sometimes amounting to an os-
trich-like isolationism) to avoid conflict. But from the beginning of the industrial
era, it now seems clear, the United states has played an increasingly active role in

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