Stephen Kinzer on Radio Open Source

Stephen Kinzer: America’s Empire State of Mind

The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“The True Flag” Book Reviews

Reviews, interviews and articles pertaining to Stephen Kinzer’s latest book, “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire”

Stop complaining about Trump — we earned him

Stop complaining about Trump — we earned him

AMERICANS WHO warned that Donald Trump would be a recklessly destabilizing president have reason to feel vindicated. Trump’s scorn for foreign alliances and diplomacy reflects his scatterbrained approach to governing, while his divisive rhetoric has measurably coarsened our national conversation. Lamenting this as a bizarre aberration, however, would be a mistake. Trump’s ascendancy reflects who we […]

Trump to walk America's perpetual imperialist-isolationist tightrope

Trump to walk America’s perpetual imperialist-isolationist tightrope

For every American president, the challenge of foreign policy boils down to a single word: intervention. Where, when and how should the United States intervene in the affairs of other countries? Do we more effectively shape the world by setting out to redeem and pacify it, or by tending to our own affairs and allowing […]

How Boston fought the empire

How Boston fought the empire

WHERE BETTER to launch a patriotic uprising than Faneuil Hall in Boston? It is a lodestone of American liberty, a cathedral for freedom fighters. That is why a handful of eminent Bostonians chose it as the place to begin a new rebellion on the sunny afternoon of June 15, 1898. Like all Americans, they had been […]