When remembering America’s first ladies, there is a general assumption that these women were the wives of the presidents. This is not surprising since, with the exception of James Buchanan, all the presidents have been married men. However, several presidents were widowers or husbands of women who could not assume their duties. These men had to rely on women who were neither their wives nor their companions as stand-in first ladies with the primary duty of entertaining visitors to the White House. They included daughters Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, Martha Johnson Patterson, and Margaret Woodrow Wilson; nieces Emily Tennessee Donelson and Harriet Lane Johnston; daughters-in-law Angelica Singleton Van Buren and Priscilla Cooper Tyler; and sisters Mary Arthur McElroy and Rose Cleveland. They were real persons who each brought a unique experience to their work, which, unlike the service of their more famous married counterparts, has long been forgotten.

Why didKeynes an exceedingly well connected young man with his feet very well planted in the English establishment,decide to take the risk of writing such an explosive book like The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919? After all, others had their doubts about Versailles; butnone went public;and ifor when theydid,it was certainly not to criticizethe peace settlementor the peacemakersin such a vitriolic fashion. SowhatledKeynes to write a book likeThe Economic Consequences of the Peace? What was his purpose in doing so? Who did he think he was writing it for?Was it his last word on the subjector was it – as Keynes believed at the time – merely the first step in a longer struggle to effectively render the economic parts of the Treaty invalid? Finally, why was the volumethe great success it turned out to be at the time, and whyis it still being debated today by both admirers and critics alike?

Developing “friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” is one of the purposes of the United Nations Organization, as stated in the founding charter of 1945. The principle of self-determination has even become a right through the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (December 1960). The Declaration states that: “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Self-determination has thus entered international law. Strangely enough, however, nowhere are the bearers of this right defined: who are the peoples entitled to claim self-determination? This omission is not there by chance. Indeed, the definition of peoplehood is far from evident. Should a people be defined on a territorial basis, i.e. include all the population living within a given territory delimited by given boundaries?

Peace planning intensified starting in 1917, as the Russian Revolution and Wilson’s decision to join the war raised its ideological stakes. There were several competing projects for cooperative control over raw materials and for international free trade, but these plans were undermined by conflicts over resource sovereignty and imperial preference. The final League Covenant included a barebones commitment to ‘equitable treatment of foreign commerce’ In the 1920s, Llewellyn Smith, Harms, Coquet, and Riedl used this legal placeholder to revisit the work that was left undone at the peace conference, drawing on the new organizational structures that developed around foreign trade policy during and after the war.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.

U.S. political and economic influence in Latin America grew and the U.S. government proudly proclaimed its hegemonic position in the early twentieth century. The U.S. adopted the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine as a response to the specter of European intervention and to Latin America’s inability to get its economic and political affairs in order. Espousing a moral obligation to bring democracy to the rest of the world, President Wilson sent U.S. troops to occupy several countries. This combination meant that hegemony and “democratic promotion” were one and the same. With U.S. businesses demonstrating greater interest in the entire region, the dollar diplomacy era saw U.S. investors and troops move ceaselessly, as diplomacy and money worked closely together. Only with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s enunciation of the Good Neighbor Policy did the United States assert the integrity and sovereignty of Latin American countries. By the end of World War II, however, the Good Neighbor Policy would be largely discarded, replaced by the exigencies of the Cold War.

This draft of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson was written around November 1918 as Wilson was preparing to sail to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference and Du Bois was likewise about to sail to Paris, to convene the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Du Bois argues that the oppression of African Americans is a matter of international concern comparable to questions due to be taken up at the Paris conference such as the fate of the Polish and Yugoslav peoples. He calls attention to the inconsistency of the United States’ pretense to world leadership in defense of peoples’ right to representative government alongside its denial of civil and political rights to African Americans. He notes African Americans’ numbers, equivalent to those of a number of sovereign countries, and their significant contributions to the country’s history, economy, and military defense. He concludes that “America owes to the world the solution of her race problem.”

Chapter 22 elucidates how a consolidation of the truncated order of Versailles was first hampered by the divergent longer-term outlooks of the victors and later decisively affected by Wilson’s defeat in the battle over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations in the American Senate. It then analyses systematically, and in a global context, how in the aftermath of the American withdrawal from it the crisis of the Versailles system escalated into a full-blown conflict in postwar Europe, which culminated in the transformative Franco-German Ruhr crisis of 1923.

Chapter 8 reassesses the question of why it ultimately proved impossible to end the Great War earlier and through a “peace without victory” along the lines the American president Wilson and other proponents of a negotiated settlement proposed. Then it re-examines how the war actually came to an end in the west. And analyses the making and consequences of the armistice that was finally concluded on 11 November 1918, highlighting that it only provided frail foundations and parameters for a modern Atlantic peace.

Chapter 10 reappraises the evolving plans and visions for a League of Nations and a new, progressive international order that were advanced by Woodrow Wilson and those who came to advise the American president and contribute to the American peace agenda that was presented at the Paris Peace Conference. It reinterprets Wilson’s core aspiration as, essentially, the pursuit of a new Atlantic order – rather than a “new world order”. And it not only analyses the underlying assumptions and maxims of the peace programme that he and his core advisers elaborated after the end of the Great War – and the crucial changes they made to this programme and their approaches to peacemaking during the critical phase between the armistice and the peace negotiations at Versailles. It also evaluates how far Wilson and his advisers had drawn deeper lessons from the war – and how far the president’s reorientated ideas and strategies for a “peace to end all wars” actually met essential requirements that had to be fulfilled to create a durable and legitimate postwar order in and beyond the newly vital transatlantic sphere.

Chapter 4 examines the influence of the Bryce Group’s war prevention plan more broadly, scrutinising the relationship between the League of Nations Society and its counterpart in the United States, the League to Enforce Peace. While scholars have hardly analysed the two groups’ interactions, both groups sprang from the liberal internationalist tradition, had a lot in common in terms of social background and worked for the same aim of reforming the global order. Such similarities, however, did not enable them to establish a constructive collaboration, let alone a transnational movement. In reality, both groups sought political support for their own post-war schemes and regarded their counterpart merely as a medium for approaching statesmen on the other side of the Atlantic. Moreover, the differences in their domestic contexts and in the British and American liberal internationalist traditions hindered the two groups from building mutual trust and a joint lobbying strategy.

With the Asquithian Liberals ejected from office, Lloyd George's new government remained in denial over the severity of Britain's economic problem in the United States. Bonar Law's new responsibilities as Chancellor alerted him to the seriousness of the crisis, but he took no meaningful action. German and American moves for peace came soon after Lloyd George's ascent to power, but the new government simply sought to manoeuvre around them. British intelligence continued to serve Lloyd George poorly, sending him decrypts that again misled Lloyd George into believing that Germany and the United States were secretly collaborating. British intelligence also decrypted the infamous Zimmermann Telegram, but decided not to share it with the government. Arthur Balfour, the new Foreign Secretary, remained extremely anxious about Britain's economic position. He used a British intelligence officer in the United States, William Wiseman, to quietly keep alive the prospect of American mediation with House. House sought new negotiations between Germany and Britain via Wiseman and the German Ambassador. Germany announced a declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, ending House's negotiations.

Grey gave a great push to convince his colleagues to consult the French government about activating the House-Grey Memorandum, only to be outmanoeuvred. With this diplomatic alternative set aside, the military successfully pressured the government to assent to a major summer offensive on the Somme. The military also sought to replace the strategy agreed a few months earlier with an economic fantasy: the military was now looking to win the war with an offensive in 1917 instead of in 1916, but refused to accept that Britain would face serious financial problems in continuing the Allies' massive US supplies through a 1917 campaign. Despite fierce resistance within the Cabinet, the House of Commons forced the acceptance of the military's position. The British government suffered a financial scare when McKenna warned that their assets deployable in the United States faced exhaustion by autumn. McKenna was wrong about the timing: Britain had more assets than he thought, enough to last them into early 1917. But the scare resulted in a serious reconsideration of the House-Grey Memorandum when House and Wilson pushed for an autumn implementation of the agreement. The memorandum's proponents were unintentionally undermined by Wilson’s speech to the US League to Enforce Peace.

Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany but began new peace efforts via Austria-Hungary. The new Austro-Hungarian Emperor Karl shared Wilson's desperation to open general peace negotiations. With the British down to their final tranche of American assets and yet refusing to cut their American spending, the Allies steadily grew more vulnerable to US pressure. Wilson pursued peace possibilities with Austria-Hungary, beginning indirect negotiations with the British leadership, who thought that an Austro-Hungarian separate peace might be on offer. These indirect negotiations led Lloyd George to make a reckless confession to the US Ambassador to London, Walter Page: Lloyd George confessed that he had secretly been reading Page's instructions from Washington. Page magnanimously kept this confession a secret. At the same time, British intelligence manouevred to make the best use of the Zimmermann Telegram. When Wilson received it, it had a dramatic effect on his diplomacy. Before, Wilson had consistently moved speedily and creatively to promote negotiations between London and Vienna. Afterward, he took a very hard line towards the Austro-Hungarians and broke off these peace negotiations despite large Austro-Hungarian concessions. Soon thereafter, the United States joined the First World War and provided massive financing to the Allies.

In the aftermath of German-American diplomatic crisis over submarines, House conceived a new, more ambitious strategy of trying to use US power to end the war and prevent an Allied defeat. Although House initially struggled to find a receptive audience amongst the British leadership, anxiety within the British government was on the rise. Efforts to reconcile Britain's economic and military strategies settled on a plan to win the war with a great 1916 offensive – a strategy that provoked serious disquiet amongst a number of key British leaders. By February 1916, a number of British leaders, including Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, encouraged House towards a still more ambitious conception of American mediation: not only would the United States play a key role in setting up the negotiations, but it would also chair them. House and Grey agreed the 'House-Grey Memorandum', in which House promised that the United States would guarantee a set of limited Allied war aims at a peace conference. All the while, British intelligence was decrypting House's telegrams and attempting to undermine his negotiations.