Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power »

Bruce Cumings is chair of the History Department at the University of Chicago and author of the award-winning book The Origins of the Korean War.

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.

Economist

“The story of America’s rapid unrolling of the exceptionalist carpet is very well told by Mr. Cumings. . . .[He] writes marvelously. . . .A lively rattlebag of a history of the Pacific slope and how the Pacific Ocean came to be an American Lake.”--Economist

Ch. 1 The Machine in the Garden 3

Ch. 2 "The Remote beyond Compare": Finding California 41

Ch. 3 A Continent in Five Easy Pieces 55

Ch. 4 Manifest Destiny's Offspring: Gold, the Continental Railroad, Texas 94

Ch. 5 Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy 126

Ch. 6 East of Eden: The Pacific Northwest 157

Ch. 7 Edens Lush and Frigid 175

Ch. 8 Pacific Crossings: Asians in the New States 197

Ch. 9 A Garden Cornucopia 219

Ch. 10 "There It Is. Take It": Water and Power 244

Ch. 11 Southern California: Island on the Pacific 264

Ch. 12 The State as Pretense of Itself: Developing the West 299

Ch. 13 Postwar California and the Rise of Western Republicanism 335

Ch. 14 In California's Shadow: The Rest of the West in the Postwar Era 363

Ch. 15 Archipelago of Empire: An American Grid for the Global Garden 388

Ch. 16 Silicon Valley: A New World at the Edge of the Sea 424

Ch. 17 Conclusion: The American Ascendancy 471

Appendix 501

Notes 515

Bibliography 553

Index 589