Abstract: The author discusses the mediation mission of the US President T. Roosevelt, who made a significant contribution to the end of the bloody Russian-Japanese war of 1904-1905. Having offered assistance to the conflicting parties in search of a mutual compromise, he sought to use the contradictions between the great powers through skillful maneuvering in the interests of the increased influence of his own country on world politics. In the theory of the "balance of power" formulated by him, the main attention is paid to the distribution of control zones between major geopolitical players, while a significant place in international relations was given to the United States, which at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries actively joined the struggle for sales markets. When considering the "good deeds" of the President, the main emphasis is placed on the analysis of the various diplomatic means used by him to achieve his goals. He was one of the first to resort to the so-called "multilateral" diplomacy, which involved the complex application of both conventional and non-traditional measures of mediation. By assuming the role of an intermediary, he was able not only to achieve the delimitation of spheres of influence with Japan in East Asia, but also to "open the doors" for American capital to Northern China on the basis of the principle of the most favored nation. The Portsmouth Peace led to a change in the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region, in which the United States, thanks to the successful mediation of Roosevelt, became the main player in international diplomacy.
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Abstract: The article examines the formation of one of the foreign policy doctrines of expansionism, which became the main instrument of US foreign policy in the twentieth century. The theory of "open doors", the essence of which is to provide equal opportunities to all interested parties on the basis of unlimited economic freedom and unhindered penetration of capital, was proclaimed by Secretary of State J. Hay in 1899 in relation with China, which was considered as a potential market for the sale of industrial goods and a profitable object of capital investment. Having opposed the division of China by the European powers, the American ruling elites proposed to replace individual control over individual parts of the country, according to the concluded agreements on "spheres of influence", with the establishment of a collective system of external supervision over its entire territory. By putting external expansion in the form of international agreement, they wanted to force competitors stronger in military and political terms to play by the proposed rules, transferring power rivalry to the trade and economic area, where their commercial superiority was undoubted. The nationalist movement of the Yihetuans, which began in the autumn of 1898, aimed at expelling foreigners out of the country, jeopardized the idea of implementing the doctrine of "open doors". After much thought, the White House abandoned the widely disseminated peacefulness and approved the participation of the expeditionary force in the joint intervention of European powers in China. Interference in the internal political affairs of a formally sovereign state meant that the United States was involved in its violent redistribution. Later, Washington continued to follow its course around the world, creating an arsenal of new political and economic methods, officially formalized as a generally accepted international principle in the 1922 treaty of the Nine Powers.

Abstract: Slavery has always been condemned across the world; however in the end of the XX century, such canonical concept was rectified based on the extensive examination by American scholars of compilation of narratives of the former slaves collected in 1930s in the United States. At that time, 2,300 former slaves from 17 states were interviewed about their life in the era of slavery. Later, these interviews were placed in open access on the website of the Library of US Congress, reconstructing a contradictory picture of everyday life of African-Americans in the conditions of plantation economy: some reminiscences convey almost a nostalgic feeling of the past, while others criticizes it severely. The author in his attempt explain the historical accuracy of the results of mass interviewing of African-Americans, tries to make sense why 70 years later, the eyewitnesses of the same event have polar viewpoints. Forming the new comparative-historical approaches towards examination of collective consciousness under the influence of anthropologization of historical knowledge, the interview materials allow reconstructing the period, demonstrating the value system of the entire population group, unlike biography that structures the chain of events in chronological order. Analysis of the archive “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938” has not been previously conducted within the Russian historiography, just briefly mentioned as one of the documentary aspects of the institution of slavery. The contained material is important for scientific comprehension of the bygone era of slavery, reflected in the collective memory of long-suffering African-American sub-ethnos. The problem of slavery in the United States, which synthesizes heritage of the past with practices of everyday life in various manifestations, seems optimal from the perspective of historiographical interest.