Arms at Rest: Peacemaking and Peacekeeping in American History

by Robert L. Beisner, Joan R. Challinor

This outstanding collection of essays is the product of a symposium on peacemaking and peacekeeping, sponsored by the National Committee for the Bicentennial of the Treaty of Paris. The original papers included in this volume were written by leading scholars from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada to assess themes related to the prerequisites and consequences of peace. The emphasis is on peaceful outcomes and the preservation of peace, rather than the causes of war, and the writings reflect a penetrating awareness of the many facets of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Included are thought-provoking discussions on the impact of war and promise of peace on women, the American perception of peace as an opportunity for profit and as a private political issue, the avoidance of war, and the possible obsolescence of war in our own era.

238 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 1987

About the author

A historian of American foreign relations, Robert Beisner taught at American University from 1965 until his retirement in 1998. He attended Hastings College for two years, before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he earned both his master’s degree (1960) and his doctorate (1965) in history. His dissertation won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history in 1966, and he served as editor in chief of the two-volume bibliographic Guide to the Foreign Relations of the United States.