Contours of American History

William Appleman Williams was one of America’s greatest critics of US imperialism. The Contours of American History first published in 1961 reached back to seventeenth-century British history to argue that the relationship between liberalism and empire was in effect a grand compromise with expansion abroad containing class and race tensions at home. Coming as it did before the political explosions of the 1960s Williams’s message was a deeply heretical one and yet the Modern Library ultimately chose Contours as one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th Century.