American Foreign Policy to 1899 is the first of two volumes on American foreign policy in Ashbrook’s series of core document volumes covering major periods, themes, and institutions in American history and government. This volume covers the story of America’s foreign relations through the rise of the United States to great power status. Its companion volume will cover events of the twentieth century, as well as the attack on September 11. This volume presents such cornerstones of American foreign policy as Washington’s Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine, but also covers some of the less well known practices and incidents of the nineteenth century. The similarities between the issues and practices presented in this volume and those that occurred in the twentieth century, during the Cold War, for example, are striking.

The two foreign policy volumes, along with the already published volume The Cold War, will together offer a thorough account of American foreign policy. This volume also forms a pair with the already published volume Westward Expansion. Covering roughly the same time period, Westward Expansion deals with the acquisition of territory that became states, while American Foreign Policy to 1899 deals with everything else. The one exception to this division of labor concerns Hawaii, covered in both volumes, although from different perspectives.