Richard Drake received a Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 1976. His teaching career at the University of Montana began in 1982 where in 2017 he became the inaugural holder of the Lucile Speer Research Chair in Politics and History. His published work includes four books on modern Italian history, including The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (1989), which will appear in a second edition later this year from Indiana University Press. He has published two books on American foreign policy: The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) and Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism (Cornell University Press, 2018). He currently is working on a book with the working title of “Mark Twain and the Course of the American Empire.”
The “Blowback” series, comprising three volumes, remains a prime source for understanding the motives of American foreign policy in the Trump era and merits a retrospective appreciation.
