Original accounts of the Marshall Plan, or the European Recovery Program as it was known officially, hailed this celebrated enterprise as evidence of America's assumption of world leadership after the Second World War. Together with the North Atlantic Treaty and other instruments of Cold War diplomacy, the Marshall Plan supposedly marked the end of the isolationist era and the beginning of what Henry Luce called the “American Century.” This interpretation paralleled that found in older works on domestic history. These works viewed the New Deal as a second American revolution, the domestic equivalent of the revolution in American diplomacy engineered by Cold War policymakers in the 1940s. More recent works, to be sure, have begun to overturn the older interpretation. Those on domestic history have portrayed twentieth-century developments as part of a larger historical process by which Americans adjusted their economic and political institutions to the profound transformations brought on by industrialization. In these works, the liberal critique embedded in older scholarship, which separated the New Deal of the 1930s from the New Era of the 1920s, has given way to interpretations that consider both eras related parts of the modern American search for a new economic and political order.

Scholars of American diplomacy have been slow to pursue this theme. Recent works in this field have failed to connect the trends in domestic history to those in the history of foreign relations or to note how institutional adaptations at home influenced the direction of policy abroad.