America is the first world power to inhabit an immense land mass open at both ends to the world's two largest oceans - the Atlantic and the Pacific. This gives America a great competitive advantage often overlooked by Atlanticists, whose focus remains overwhelmingly fixed on America's relationship with Europe. Bruce Cumings challenges the Atlanticist perspective in this innovative new history, arguing that relations with Asia influenced our history greatly. Cumings chronicles how the movement westward, from the Middle West to the Pacific, has shaped America's industrial, technological, military, and global rise to power. He unites domestic and international history, international relations, and political economy to demonstrate how technological change and sharp economic growth have created a truly bicoastal national economy that has led the world for more than a century. Cumings emphasizes the importance of American encounters with Mexico, the Philippines, and the nations of East Asia. The result is a wonderfully integrative history that advances a strong argument for a dual approach to American history incorporating both Atlanticist and Pacificist perspectives.

Bruce Cumings is chair of the history department at the University of Chicago. Author of the award-winning book The Origins of the Korean War, he has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New Left Review, London Review of Books, and The Nation.

"In this fascinating book, Bruce Cumings, whose scholarly work has focused on East Asia, shows that he can be just as adept and exciting in writing American history. Actually, it is a 'Pacificist' version of U.S. history. He shows that 'the American story' can never be fully told unless the Western parts of the United States as well as the Pacific region are incorporated. Describing in colorful detail developments in the Western states, including Texas, as well as the countries of East Asia, the author argues that these developments have been inseparable from the story of U.S. 'dominion from sea to sea, ' or its overwhelming military presence in 'the global archipelago.' The book fits into an emerging scholarly trend, to transcend narrowly focused national narratives and to deal with larger entities and in large frameworks such as Atlantic history, Europeanization, South Asian cosmopolitanism that have already enriched our understanding of modern global history. Few historians are as capable as Cumings of launching the field of Pacific history, and readers will find in this imaginatively conceived and earnestly but also humorously presented history much that will help them understand how the United States became globalized domestically and internationally, and what the future holds both for the nation and for the world."--Akira Iriye, Harvard University--Akira Iriye