Between the American Civil War and the outbreak of world War I, global history was transformed by two events: the United States's rise to the status of a great world power (indeed, the world's greatest economic power) and the eruption of nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions in Mexico, China, Russia, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. The American Search for Opportunity traces the U.S. foreign policy between 1865 and 1913, linking these two historic trends by noting how the United States - usually thought of as antirevolutionary and embarked on a 'search for order' during this era - actually was a determinative force in helping to trigger these revolutions. Walter LaFeber argues that industrialization fuelled centralisation: Post-Civil War America remained a vast, unwieldy country of isolated, parochial communities, but the federal government and a new corporate capitalism now had the power to invade these areas and integrate them into an industrialization, railway-linked nation-state. The furious pace of economic growth in America attracted refugees from all parts of the world. Professor LaFeber describes and influx of immigration so enormous that it led to America's first exclusionary immigration act. In 1882, the United States passed legislation preventing all Chinese immigrant labour, skilled and unskilled, from entering the country for the next 10 years. Racism and domestic affairs, exemplified by the hundreds of lynchings in the United States during the 1890's and the rampant anti-Asian outbreaks of the era, influenced foreign policy as well. Racism was particularly important in the Philippine and native-American cases. In the late 1880's U.S. military forces consolidated white power by destroying the last major Indian opposition. This success in empire building at home led to attempts in the late 1890's to create a new empire of commerce and insular possession in the Caribbean and across the Pacific Ocean. The struggle for markets in Asia and elsewhere drove U.S. foreign policy during the era. The Cuban crisis of 1898, which sparked the Spanish-American War, provided the opportunity to annex the Philippines and thereby secure one of the most strategic positions in the Asian region. America's rise to the status of a world power necessitated the development of its naval forces to protect the nation's commerce. Such a navy, in turn, required overseas coaling bases and rest stops. These years were the beginning of the 'American century'. The roots of that century, and its two great products - U.S. power and revolutions abroad - are analysed here, as well as the 'imperial presidency' that U.S. officials developed to control the revolutionary outbreaks and restore order for the sake of further American opportunity. The book includes a valuable bibliographic essay on the large historical literature of American foreign relations during the period.