Conservative historian Larry Schweikart has won wide acclaim for his number one New York Times bestseller, A Patriot’s History of the United States. It proved that, contrary to the liberal biases in countless other his­tory books, America had not really been founded on racism, sexism, greed, and oppression. Schweikart and coauthor Michael Allen restored the truly great achievements of America’s patriots, founders, and heroes to their rightful place of honor.

 

Now Schweikart and coauthor Dave Dougherty are back with a new perspective on America’s half-century rise to the center of the world stage. This all-new volume corrects many of the biases that cloud the way people view the Treaty of Versailles, the Roaring Twenties, the Crash of 1929, the deployment of the atomic bomb, and other critical events in global history.

 

Beginning with the Spanish-American War— which introduced the United States as a global military power that could no longer be ignored—and con­tinuing through the end of World War II, this book shows how a free, capitalist nation could thrive when put face-to-face with tyrannical and socialist powers. Schweikart and Dougherty narrate the many times America proved its dominance by upholding the prin­ciples on which it was founded—and struggled on the rare occasions when it strayed from those principles.

 

The authors make a convincing case that America has constantly been a force for good in the world, improving standards of living, introducing innova­tions, guaranteeing liberty, and offering opportunities to those who had none elsewhere. They also illustrate how the country ascended to superpower status at the same time it was figuring out its own identity. While American ideals were defeating tyrants abroad, a con­stant struggle against progressivism was being waged at home, leading to the stumbles of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

Despite this rocky entrance on the world stage, it was during this half century that the world came to embrace all things American, from its innovations and businesses to its political system and popular culture. The United States began to define what the rest of the world could emulate as the new global ideal.

A Patriot’s History of the Modern World provides a new perspective on our extraordinary past—and offers lessons we can apply to preserve American exceptional­ism today and tomorrow.

“As Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen proved in A Patriot’s History of the United States, history is even more fascinating when authors have no ideological axe to grind. With this wonderful, provocative, challenging page-fanning ride through the modern world, Schweikart and co-author Dave Dougherty have done it again, informing us, entertaining us, and deliciously standing political correctness on its head—where it ought to be.”
— David Limbaugh

"Schweikart and Dougherty examine nearly 50 years of growing American political and military mastery from the Spanish-American War to WWII. Choosing a theme of Yankee exceptionalism (with four pillars: common law, Protestantism, free market capitalism, and private property), the authors (Schweikart is a professor of history at the University of Dayton and coauthored The Patriot’s History Reader with Dougherty) make a convincing case for the series of trial-and-error achievements from Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations through Prohibition to the ultimate victory over Japan with the atomic bomb: “America’s ascent to world power demonstrated that so long as the essence of American exceptionalism remained at the core of all efforts foreign and domestic, the likelihood of success was nearly guaranteed.” There is a conservative slant on some issues, such as the criticism of FDR’s New Deal, but the sections on Margaret Sanger’s embrace of eugenics (less well known than her birth control advocacy) and the rise of the fascists in Europe are noteworthy in their detail. Sweeping in scope and, as the title indicates, unapologetically patriotic, this book honors the American way at home and abroad with its firm emphasis on “human dignity and prosperity.”
— Publishers Weekly