American Diplomacy Under Tyler and Polk

 

A review of American Diplomacy under Tyler and Polk (Johns Hopkins, 1907) by Jesse S. Reeves.

Both as an interesting chapter in the history of the diplomacy of the United States, and as dealing with an important and but recently exploited period of our national politics, Dr. Jesse S. Reeves’s American Diplomacy under Tyler and Polk is a timely and welcome work, which embodies the lectures delivered in 1906 before the Johns Hopkins Uni­versity, upon the Albert Shaw foundation in diplomatic history. To the lectures as then delivered Dr. Reeves has added as two concluding chapters, one which contains the report of Mackenzie, delegated by Polk to confer with Santa Anna at Havana, in June, 1846 (here printed for the first time), and one upon the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which appeared in the American Historical Review for January, 1905. The sources of the book are found, first in the state papers, and the corre­spondence of Webster, Calhoun, and other leading actors in the tangled negotiations of this period, and secondly in the diary of President Polk of which Dr. Reeves has made a careful and critical study. Thus excel­lently documented the volume is of importance to all who wish to work in this field, while the easy style in which the book is written invites the attention of the general reader and will make it serviceable to younger students.

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