In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France to Hitler's advancing troops, opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy organized their many divergent groups into the powerful and vocal America First Committee (AFC). The committee coordinated all anti-interventionist efforts to block Roosevelt's proposals for providing lend-lease assistance abroad, arming merchant ships, and escorting war supplies to Allied ports. The AFC held huge public rallies, distributed tons of literature, supplied research data to members of Congress, and sponsored coast-to-coast radio speakers to support the anti-interventionist position. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the AFC had 450 units and at least 250,000 members. Many historians believe the AFC's massive and efficient campaign was responsible for delaying US entry into World War II. In Danger Undaunted, based on 338 manuscript boxes deposited in 1942 in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, conveys the logic, complexity, and passion of the anti-interventionist movement. The book illustrates the dramatic impact this well-organized and vocal group had on US foreign policy and on the political behavior of many of America's most prominent statesmen of the prewar years.

Jonathan Marshall makes a provocative statement: it was not ideological or national security considerations that led the United States into war with Japan in 1941. Instead, he argues, it was a struggle for access to Southeast Asia's vast storehouse of commodities—rubber, oil, and tin—that drew the United States into the conflict. Boldly departing from conventional wisdom, Marshall reexamines the political landscape of the time and recreates the mounting tension and fear that gripped U.S. officials in the months before the war. Unusual in its extensive use of previously ignored documents and studies, this work records the dilemmas of the Roosevelt administration: it initially hoped to avoid conflict with Japan and, after many diplomatic overtures, it came to see war as inevitable. Marshall also explores the ways that international conflicts often stem from rivalries over land, food, energy, and industry. His insights into "resource war," the competition for essential commodities, will shed new light on U.S. involvement in other conflicts—notably in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

How liberalism and one of the most dramatic eras in American history were shaped by an influential university president and his powerful circle of friends Yale's Kingman Brewster was the first and only university president to appear on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and the last of the great campus leaders to become an esteemed national figure. He was also the center of the liberal establishment—a circle of influential men who fought to keep the United States true to ideals and extend the full range of American opportunities to all citizens of every class and color. Using Brewster as his focal point, Geoffrey Kabaservice shows how he and his lifelong friends—Kennedy adviser McGeorge Bundy, Attorney General and statesman Elliot Richardson, New York mayor John Lindsay, Bishop Paul Moore, and Cyrus Vance, pillar of Washington and Wall Street—helped usher this country through the turbulence of the 1960s, creating a legacy that still survives. In a narrative that is as engaging and lively as it is meticulously researched, The Guardians judiciously and convincingly reclaims the importance of Brewster and his generation, illuminating their vital place in American history as the bridge between the old establishment and modern liberalism.