Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land called Cold War America, there was a history written of U.S. foreign relations. It was powerfully and, for the most part, unself-consciously shaped by national borders. It was often sophisticated in its research and analysis as well as complicated and diverse in its politics, ranging from orthodox defenses of U.S. policies abroad to revisionist critiques of what was often labeled the American empire. But most of its authors, on the left and right, wrote from a “world according to Washington” perspective, one rooted in the rich archival resources available on most aspects of U.S. policy making, but also driven primarily by questions about how Americans – particularly, powerful, elite makers of government policy – understood and behaved toward the rest of the world. Indeed, historians on the left and right shared a usually unrecognized common ground of emphasizing the role of the United States often to the detriment of other actors in the international arena. A few of the authors of this older history did take a broader view, internationalizing their footnotes with multilingual research as they began to write more comprehensive histories of the bilateral and multilateral relationships of the United States with other states. And some, influenced by the rise of social history in the 1970s and 1980s, pushed beyond questions of state policy and state behavior. Up through the 1980s, however, this historiography continued to be shaped, above all else and regardless of authors’ politics, by national borders and the governments contained therein.