In his 2009 SHAFR presidential address, Thomas Alan Schwartz delivered a “plea for recognizing the ongoing importance of politics in our work and perhaps acknowledging that more traditional political explanations may explain more about American foreign relations than some of the more recent and trendier undertakings in our field.”Footnote ¹ It is a plea that eleven UK-based scholars have taken seriously in this fine book. Emerging from a conference held at the University of Leicester, they have produced a rich and varied – but nevertheless cohesive and well-edited – volume that explores the numerous ways in which American public opinion has impacted on US foreign policy from the age of McKinley to the age of Bush.

To be sure, not all of the essays are “traditional” in the sense that Schwartz was talking about. Although some focus on politics, the press, and pressure groups, others emphasize class, race, and gender. And, in fact, the volume works best when it explores these “trendier” issues – when, for instance, Andrew Preston looks at the contribution made by religious groups to the debates about internationalism in the first two decades of the twentieth century; when Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones assesses labour's influence over tariff debates in the same period, focussing on Massachusetts as a case study; when Carl Watts tackles the issue of race in the context of African American responses to the Rhodesian crisis during the 1960s; or when Helen Laville analyses the complex ways that debates on “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan have played out since 9/11. But even the essays in a more traditional mould offer something interesting and new. Thus Joseph Smith focusses not on the familiar story of the press and the public's role in the US decision to go to war against Spain in 1898 but on their reactions to the way this war was fought; Elizabeth Stephens looks not at the much-discussed impact of the famous Jewish American lobby but at the importance of shared and “irreducible core” values (134) in explaining the close relationship between the United States and Israel; and Scott Lucas places less emphasis on George W. Bush's marketing campaign for war in Iraq and more on the public's basic willingness to be led.

Throughout, many of the contributors are careful not to claim too much explanatory power for public opinion. Indeed, their conclusions are prudently couched in terms such as “it is impossible to ascertain the full impact of the American public on Vietnam policy” (51), or “it is impossible to know whether the transformation of American diplomacy” would have occurred without the input from particular pressure groups (84). Such prudence, in the context of the book's overall contribution, highlights both an opportunity and a challenge for future of studies in this field. Clearly public opinion has exerted some impact on foreign policy. Clearly as well it is too often ignored in the contemporary literature, thereby creating a skewed impression of why the United States acts the way it does in the world. But if this volume is a timely reminder of the need to write the domestic context back in, then the cautious phrasing of many of its individual chapters also underlines the fact that a lot more work needs to be done to gauge precisely when, why, and to what extent the domestic context has had a major impact at different points in time.