What historians write and teach is a hopefully constructive synthesis of creative thought, labor in the primary sources, and absorption of and reaction to the work of others. The following comments direct interested readers to a selection of the historical literature that has shaped The Creation of a Republican Empire. For a comprehensive list of writings on American diplomacy, though limited to works published before 1981, see Richard Dean Burns, ed., Guide to American Foreign Policy Since 1700 (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1983).

The Canvas and the Prism

John Quincy Adams’s career is traced in Samuel Flagg Bemis’s magisterial biography John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1949) and John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956), based very largely on Adams’s papers, which Bemis was the first to use. Bemis, whose own physical and intellectual affinity with Adams was often noted, treats his subject sympathetically.