Although the mid-1940s presented important advancements in the history of congressional legislation for foreign aid, the trend in scholarship to designate this period as the “birth” of U.S. Foreign Assistance is problematic because it entraps the practice in the paradigms of the Cold War and ignores its historic roots. Using the Congressional Record as a primary data source, this project will produce the first comprehensive accounting of pre-WWII foreign aid legislation as well as the cognitive-perceptual framework that guided legislative decision-making in the 1st through 80th Congresses (1789-1949). The study will challenge conventional theoretical paradigms about how and why the U.S. Congress came to have a foreign aid program and will further understanding of the historic connections between foreign aid and international conflict.