What effect did personality and circumstance have on US foreign policy during World War II? This incisive account of US envoys residing in the major belligerent countries – Japan, Germany, Italy, China, France, Great Britain, USSR – highlights the fascinating role played by such diplomats as Joseph Grew, William Dodd, William Bullitt, Joseph Kennedy and W. Averell Harriman. Between Hitler's 1933 ascent to power and the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki, US ambassadors sculpted formal policy – occasionally deliberately, other times inadvertently – giving shape and meaning not always intended by Franklin D. Roosevelt or predicted by his principal advisors. From appeasement to the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War, David Mayers examines the complicated interaction between policy, as conceived in Washington, and implementation on the ground in Europe and Asia. By so doing, he also sheds needed light on the fragility, ambiguities and enduring urgency of diplomacy and its crucial function in international politics.

Numerical analysis provides the theoretical foundation for the numerical algorithms we rely on to solve a multitude of computational problems in science. Based on a successful course at Oxford University, this book covers a wide range of such problems ranging from the approximation of functions and integrals to the approximate solution of algebraic, transcendental, differential and integral equations. Throughout the book, particular attention is paid to the essential qualities of a numerical algorithm - stability, accuracy, reliability and efficiency. The authors go further than simply providing recipes for solving computational problems. They carefully analyse the reasons why methods might fail to give accurate answers, or why one method might return an answer in seconds while another would take billions of years. This book is ideal as a text for students in the second year of a university mathematics course. It combines practicality regarding applications with consistently high standards of rigour.

This book offers a major rereading of US foreign policy from Thomas Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana expanse to the Korean War. This period of one hundred and fifty years saw the expansion of the United States from fragile republic to transcontinental giant. David Mayers explores the dissenting voices which accompanied this dramatic ascent, focusing on dissenters within the political and military establishment and on the recurrent patterns of dissent that have transcended particular policies and crises. The most stubborn of these sprang from anxiety over the material and political costs of empire while other strands of dissent have been rooted in ideas of exigent justice, realpolitik, and moral duties existing beyond borders. Such dissent is evident again in the contemporary world when the US occupies the position of preeminent global power. Professor Mayers's study reminds us that America's path to power was not as straightforward as it might now seem.

One of a select group of American foreign service officers to receive specialized training on the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, George Frost Kennan eventually became the American government's chief expert on Soviet affairs during the height of the Cold War. Drawing upon a wealth of original research, David Mayers' fascinating life of George Kennan examines his high-level participation in foreign policy-making and interprets his political and philosophical development within a historical framework. Mayers presents an engaging and lucid account of Kennan's training; his rise to prominence during the late 1940s and his policy failures; and his later roles as critic of America's external policy, advocate of détente with the Soviet Union, and proponent of nuclear arms limitation. Mayers also explores Kennan's complicated relationships with such important political figures and analysts as Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, and Walter Lippmann.

The main tide of international relations scholarship on the first years after World War II sweeps toward Cold War accounts. These have emphasized the United States and USSR in a context of geopolitical rivalry, with concomitant attention upon the bristling security state. Historians have also extensively analyzed the creation of an economic order (Bretton Woods), mainly designed by Americans and tailored to their interests, but resisted by peoples residing outside of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. This scholarship, centered on the Cold War as vortex and a reconfigured world economy, is rife with contending schools of interpretation and, bolstered by troves of declassified archival documents, will support investigations and writing into the future. By contrast, this book examines a past that ran concurrent with the Cold War and interacted with it, but which usefully can also be read as separable: Washington in the first years after World War II, and in response to that conflagration, sought to redesign international society. That society was then, and remains, an admittedly amorphous thing. Yet it has always had a tangible aspect, drawing self-regarding states into occasional cooperation, mediated by treaties, laws, norms, diplomatic customs, and transnational institutions. The U.S.-led attempt during the first postwar years to salvage international society focused on the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the Acheson–Lilienthal plan to contain the atomic arms race, the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals to force Axis leaders to account, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the founding of the United Nations. None of these initiatives was transformative, not individually or collectively. Yet they had an ameliorative effect, traces of which have touched the twenty-first century—in struggles to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons, bring war criminals to justice, create laws supportive of human rights, and maintain an aspirational United Nations, still striving to retain meaningfulness amid world hazards. Together these partially realized innovations and frameworks constitute, if nothing else, a point of moral reference, much needed as the border between war and peace has become blurred and the consequences of a return to unrestraint must be harrowing.

Wars and Peace is a history of the way that a range of Americans have tried to conceptualize peace during five national security crises: the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Award-winning author David Mayers examines the intellectual foundations of U.S. foreign policy since 1861 and analyzes the way that Americans across the political spectrum have, in times of conflict, conceptualized the era that would follow hostilities. Mayers looks at this history in terms of a current problem: How should the United States fashion its policy in the post-Cold War world? What is striking about previous attempts to create postwar orders, Mayers reveals, is that they failed in the test to fulfill the hopes of their authors. Yet the cumulative impact of these ideas has been to shape collective imagination in America. Mayers argues that earnest attempts at innovation notwithstanding, U.S. purpose remains unchanged and like that of every nation: to survive, to prosper if possible. Yet the effort by generations of Americans (variously naive, self-serving, contradictory) to transcend this narrow understanding has produced high drama as well as glimmerings of a more decent political life. As applicable to this day and to this study as to his own, W.E.B. Du Bois published these lines in 1935: "Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things." In this volume Mayers gives voice to a range of people who have acted on the political scene--the powerful but also the marginalized, the vanquished, the dissenting--to show how Americans of all stripes and persuasions have flavored the national discourse. Wars and Peace reacquaints readers with people whose eloquence, passion, and even wrongheadedness, gave texture to the debates of their times.

George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, W. Averell Harriman, William Bullitt, Joseph E. Davies, Llewlleyn Thompson, Jack Matlock: these are important names in the history of American foreign policy. Together with a number of lesser-known officials, these diplomats played a vital role in shaping U.S. strategy and popular attitudes toward the Soviet Union throughout its 75-year history. In The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy, David Mayers presents the most comprehensive critical examination yet of U.S. diplomats in the Soviet Union. Mayers' vivid portrayal evokes the social and intellectual atmosphere of the American embassy in the midst of crucial episodes: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Purges, the Grand Alliance in World War II, the early Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the rise and decline of detente, and the heady days of perestroika and glasnost. He also offers rare portraits of the professional lives of the diplomats themselves: their adjustment to Soviet life, the quality of their analytical reporting, their contact with other diplomats in Moscow, and their influence on Washington. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of American diplomacy in its most challenging area, this compelling book fills an important gap in the history of U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-Soviet relations. Readers interested in U.S. foreign policy, the cold war, and the policies and history of the former Soviet Union will find The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy an intriguing and informative work. "A work of superb historical analysis that gives carefully researched recognition to the role that American chiefs of mission in Russia and the former Soviet Union played in the furtherance ofour foreign policy interests". -- American Academy of Diplomacy "Mayers' skill in evoking the travails of the Moscow station and in assessing the advice and impact of U.S. ambassadors, together with his keen sense of the functions of diplomacy, makes for enthralling reading. This is

One of a select group of American foreign service officers to receive specialized training on the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, George Frost Kennan eventually became the American government 's chief expert on Soviet affairs during the height of the Cold War. Drawing upon a wealth of original research, David Mayers' fascinating life of George Kennan examines his high-level participation in foreign policy-making and interprets his political and philosophical development within a historical framework. Mayers presents an engaging and lucid account of Kennan 's training; his rise to prominence during the late 1940s and his policy failures; and his later roles as critic of America 's external policy, advocate of d'etente with the Soviet Union, and proponent of nuclear arms limitation.

A fascinating history of American diplomacy in the Second World War and the ways US ambassadors shaped formal foreign policy.