Warren Zimmerman: First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. 2002. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 576 pp.

Abstract

A century ago, Americans across the country—rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural—engaged in a grassroots debate over whether their country should acquire colonies and become a global power on the European model. Warren Zimmermann’s book examines American imperialism in this age, weighs its positives and negatives, and suggests that this history has relevance for our own age in which “American empire” is again controversial.