Bruce Cumings - Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power

Preface

Acknowledgments

I A Frontier of the Mind

CHAPTER 1 The Machine in the Garden

CHAPTER 2 "The Remote beyond Compare": Finding California

II From Sea to Shining Sea. Manifest Destiny

CHAPTER 3 A Continent in Five Easy Pieces

CHAPTER 4 Manifest Destiny's Offspring: Gold, the Continental Railroad, Texas

CHAPTER 5 Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy

III Pacc States, New England Peoples

CHAPTER 6 East of Eden: The Pacific Northwest

CHAPTER 7 Edens Lush and Frigid

CHAPTER 8 Pacific Crossings: Asians in the New States

IV Y Crust of the Earth": Protean California

CHAPTER 9 A Garden Cornucopia

CHAPTER 10 "There It Is. Take It": Water and Power

CHAPTER 11 Southern California: Island on the Pacific

V A Tieing Point

CHAPTER 12 The State as Pretense of Itself: Developing the West

CHAPTER 13 Postwar California and the Rise of Western Republicanism

CHAPTER 14 In California's Shadow: The Rest of the West in the Postwar Era

CHAPTER 15 Archipelago of Empire: An American Grid for the Global Garden

CHAPTER 16 Silicon Valley: A New World at the Edge of the Sea

CHAPTER 17 Conclusion: The American Ascendancy

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

This book develops a Pacific perspective on America's relationship to the world, standing in James Polk's Washington a century and a half ago and coming down to the present, drawing a fairly straight line all the way from the origin and development of California and the West ultimately to the heartland of the People's Republic of China. If Walt Whitman and historian Richard Drinnon had not thought of it first, "facing West" would be the title of this book. In other words, this is not a book about the West or about American involvement in the Pacific. It is about both, as a way of erasing the line between domestic and international perspectives. In exploring the contemporary American ascendancy, I attempt to join together what other authors usually treat separately: domestic and international history, international relations and political economy, and both sides of a vigorous Pacific economy. This book is also about technological change, and how sharp leaps forward in economic growth created a bicoastal national economy that has led the world for more than a century, a development that also transformed, undercut, or simply crushed original American conceptions of the continent they first inhabited nearly 400 years ago: a garden, an Eden, Arcadia, someday a Utopia.