This project seeks to explain the continued predominance of the United States in the world, through an emphasis on the Pacific dimensions of American power. Most of the American literature on international affairs remains deeply imbued with Atlanticism. I am exploring the contribution of the understudied Pacific dimension, which began with the extension of the frontier and nineteenth-century trade and diplomacy with East Asia, but which in the past half-century has come to rival and in many ways surpass our Atlantic relations in its importance. In exploring the contemporary global ascendancy of the U. S. I want to join together what many scholars treat separately: international relations and political economy, domestic and international history, mass production and mass culture, and both sides of a vast Pacific Rim industrial economy. Much of the work on contemporary foreign policy lacks the historical and political-economic dimension that I hope to bring to this project, which is explicitly comparative and transnational.