Wilsonian Visions: The Williamstown Institute of Politics

This event is virtual. All are welcome. Please click the link below to join the webinar:
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Wilsonian Visions:  The Williamstown Institute of Politics and American Internationalism after the First World War by James McAllister was published by Cornell University Press in 2021. Prof. McAllister will join John Milton Cooper, Jr., University of Wisconsin-Madison, Emeritus for a virtual conversation about the book.

James McAllister is the Fred Greene Third Century Professor of Political Science at Williams College and the author of No Exit: America and the German Problem, 1943–1954.

John Milton Cooper Jr. is an American historian, author, and educator. He specializes in late 19th and early 20th-century American political and diplomatic history with a particular focus on presidential history. His 2009 biography of Woodrow Wilson was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and biographer Patricia O’Toole has called him “the world’s greatest authority on Woodrow Wilson.”

About the Book, from Cornell University Press: In Wilsonian Visions, James McAllister recovers the history of the most influential forum of American liberal internationalism in the immediate aftermath of the First World War: The Williamstown Institute of Politics. Established in 1921 by Harry A. Garfield, the president of Williams College, the Institute was dedicated to promoting an informed perspective on world politics even as the United States, still gathering itself after World War I, retreated from the Wilsonian vision of active involvement in European political affairs.

Located on the Williams campus in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, the Institute’s annual summer session of lectures and roundtables attracted scholars, diplomats, and peace activists from around the world. Newspapers and press services reported the proceedings and controversies of the Institute to an American public divided over fundamental questions about US involvement in the world. In an era where the institutions of liberal internationalism were just taking shape, Garfield’s institutional model was rapidly emulated by colleges and universities across the US.

McAllister narrates the career of the Institute, tracing its roots back to the tragedy of the First World War and Garfield’s disappointment in America’s failure to join the League of Nations. He also shows the Progressive Era origins of the Institute and the importance of the political and intellectual relationship formed between Garfield and Wilson at Princeton University in the early 1900s.

Drawing on new and previously unexamined archival materials, Wilsonian Visions restores the Institute to its rightful status in the intellectual history of US foreign relations and shows it to be a formative institution as the country transitioned from domestic isolation to global engagement. ~ Cornell University Press

Sponsored by the W. Ford Schumann ’50 Program in Democratic Studies.

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