In the Time of the Americans traces the lives and thoughts of an impressive group of American leaders who, over the course of less than a century, moved the United States from its position as a resolutely isolated nation, wary of "foreign entanglements," to preeminence in international affairs.

David Fromkin, author of the best-selling A Peace to End All Peace, shows how this improbable fraternity - disparate in background, politics, and personality - shaped and educated Americans to realize that they had something unique to contribute to the world.

The men in question ranged from East Coast patrician Franklin Roosevelt to middle western storekeeper Harry Truman to career soldiers Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Douglas MacArthur. Members of a generation exhorted by Theodore Roosevelt to make its mark on the world, and inspired by Woodrow Wilson to remake the world in the service of an ideal, FDR and his contemporaries strove to carve out for America its proper - its best possible - place in the international arena.

Agreeing that history had ordained an exceptional mission for the United States, they were beset by doubts as to what that mission should be. Their careers were launched on the battlefields and in the diplomatic adventures of the First World War and its aftermath; but it was in the 1940s and 1950s that they finally took in hand the destinies of mankind, embarking on a visionary - indeed, radical - program of anti-imperialistic, often altruistic, intervention outside the Western Hemisphere.