The Foreign Service Journal - November 2017

28 NOVEMBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL BIOGRAPHYAND HISTORY Citizen of a Wider Commonwealth: Ulysses S. Grant’s Postpresidential Diplomacy Edwina S. Campbell, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016, $34.48/hardcover, $34.50/Kindle, 280 pages. In 1877 former president Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a two-year world tour that took him from Liverpool to Yokohama, with numerous stops in Europe and Asia. By contrast with most Grant biographers, who treat the tour as a pleasure trip if they discuss it at all, author Edwina Campbell chronicles Grant’s travels with the understanding that he was on a U.S. government-sanctioned diplomatic mission—in fact, the first diplomatic mission ever undertaken by a former U.S. president. Campbell demonstrates that the tour marked a turning point in the U.S. role in global affairs. In meetings with monarchs, ministers and average citizens, Grant articulated concepts of self-determination, international organization and the peaceful settlement of disputes—decades before Elihu Root’s advocacy for binding international arbitration and President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations proposal. He confirmed the United States’ commitment to Anglo-American partnership, demon- strated America’s interest in the territorial integrity of China and asserted the importance of an international order based on equality and justice. Edwina S. Campbell is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer. After leaving the State Department, she taught American foreign policy at the University of Virginia and grand strategy at National Defense University, retiring in 2014 as a professor of national security studies at Air University. Her numerous publications include Germany’s Past and Europe’s Future: The Challenges of West German Foreign Policy (Brassey’s Inc., 1989) and The Relevance of American Power: The Anglo-American Past and the Euro-Atlantic Future (Centre for Defence Studies, 1999). Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Viking,2017, $35/hardcover, $17.99/Kindle, 496 pages. In this scrupulously researched work that was published posthumously, Eliza- beth Brown Pryor homes in on six mostly unknown encounters between Abraham Lincoln and his constituents that reveal different, often surprising, aspects of the president’s character. The encounters exemplified the trials Lincoln faced during his presidency: for example, a meeting with U.S. Army officers on the eve of the Civil War, a conversation on the White House portico with an abolitionist cavalry sergeant, and a difficult exchange with a Confederate businessman and editor. Pryor draws on hundreds of letters, diaries and other pri- mary source material, as well as her own considerable storytell- ing expertise, in reconstructing the encounters. She immerses readers in the throes of the Civil War and shines a revealing light on how Lincoln bore his burden as a wartime commander-in- chief deliberating on emancipation, the exercise of emergency powers and leading a divided constituency. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who was tragically killed in an auto accident in 2015, was a Senior Foreign Service officer and an award-winning historian. She was the author of Clara Barton: Professional Angel (1988) and Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (2007), which won the 2008 Lincoln Prize, the 2007 Jefferson Davis Award, the 2008 Richard B. Harwell Book Award and the 2007 Richard S. Slatten Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography. The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence Barry Riley, Oxford University Press, 2017, $49.95/hardcover, $18.35/Kindle, 592 pages. American food aid has long been the most visible and most popular means of assisting millions of hungry people con- fronted by war, terrorism and natural cataclysms, and the famine and death that all too often follow them. In The Political History of American Food Aid , Barry Riley traces its use from the earliest days of the republic to the present: as a response to hunger, a weapon to confront the expansion of Bolshevism after World War I and communism after World War II, a method for balancing disputes between Israel and Egypt,