the chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin in 1957, he arranged for an unusual direct appointment of Williams as his replacement in teaching U.S. foreign relations. Williams accepted the tenure-track appointment and returned to Wisconsin in the fall of 1957 and remained there until 1968. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy Graduate students found his challenges to the established historiography quite compelling and flocked to the university to study with him, regardless of their fields. The same year that his most influential book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy was published, Williams's students who were members of the campus's Socialist Club, began publication of Studies on the Left, a manifesto of the emerging New Left in the United States. Like Williams, its articles offered a critique of the dominant liberalism, but after it moved to offices to New York in 1963, the club reflected less of his thinking and gradually declined and expired. Williams departed from the mainstream of U.S. historiography in the 1950s. Whereas many U.S. historians wrote the story of the United States in terms of the expansion and spread of freedom, Williams argued that the U.S. had also expanded as an empire. Williams's "central conception of American diplomacy", one critic has written, is that it was shaped "by the effort of American leaders to evade the domestic dilemmas of race and class through an escapist movement: they used world politics, he feels, to preserve a capitalist frontier safe for America's market and investment expansion". In this regard, Williams's understanding of American history owes a considerable debt to Frederick Jackson Turner and the first generation of American progressive historians. Because his history of American diplomacy pivots on John Hay's Open Door Notes to China–at around the same time as the closing of the internal American frontier–Williams's larger argument is sometimes referred to as the "Open Door thesis". In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Williams described the Open Door Policy as "America's version of the liberal policy of informal empire or free trade imperialism." Williams maintained that the United States was more responsible for the Cold War than the Soviet Union. Williams argued that American politicians, fearful of a loss of markets in Europe, had exaggerated the threat of world domination from the Soviet Union. Amid much criticism, Williams made no moral distinction between the foreign policy of Joseph Stalin in Eastern Europe and the foreign policy