Walter Mcdougall's Promised Land, Crusader State

Between the title and the contents of the book being divided into “old testament” and “new testament,” Walter McDougall’s book Promised Land, Crusader State looks to be a book on a religious topic at first glance. Published in 1997, it is actually the subtitle “The American Encounter with the World Since 1776” that hints at the book’s actual direction and purpose. This is a book that dives into how America has participated in the world since the birth of our nation and how our views and actions on interacting with the rest of the globe have changed over time to shape us into the country we are today. Walter McDougall won the Pulitzer Prize for history for his book The Heavens and The Earth: A Political History of The Space Age in 1986. Although Promised Land, Crusader State is also included
The “new testament” defines our actions in geopolitics from roughly 1900 on to the present. “Those first four traditions were founded by our founding generations, late 18th, early 19th century, for a specific purpose: it was to prevent the rest of the world from influencing, shaping, defining what America was to be. Twentieth century new testament traditions are almost the reverse, they were all defined in order to give America the chance of shaping, influencing, defining what the rest of the world is going to be.” McDougall says in his interview with Booknotes. McDougall goes on to splits this “new testament” into: progressive imperialism, Wilsonianism or liberal internationalism, containment, and global meliorism. “These first four traditions were all about being and becoming…these last four traditions are all about doing and relating, and were designed to give America the chance to shape the outside world’s future.” (pg.