| Following American entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson pledged that the ensuing peace would guarantee the rights of minority populations and leave a more just territorial arrangement than that which existed in 1914. Wilson laid out his Fourteen Points, most of which concerned territorial issues. A little-known group of geographers and other social scientists, known by the moniker The Inquiry, and directed on a day-to-day basis by geographer Isaiah Bowman took Wilson's ideas and laid them out in a series of maps and territorial plans that became known as "The Black Book." Much of this book was implemented in the Paris Peace Conference treaties, wherein the United States tried to create a new world order, one that disassembled empires and replaced them with nation-states. This dissertation examines the contents of the Black Book both to evaluate how Wilson's ideas of self-determination were applied in practice and to analyze the relative success of President Wilson in implementing his peace plans at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Although many scholars have portrayed Wilson's accomplishments as mostly a failure, this dissertation argues that more of the American peace plan was implemented than left behind, and much of it survives in the modern world map. Furthermore, the American legacy from the Paris Peace Conference even more strongly is reflected in a paradigm shift into how we understand the world system of states by normalizing the concept of the nation-state as the idealized unit of political organization on the international scale. |
