When refracted through California, the story of US naval expansion in the 1880s – the creation of a small but respectable force of steel cruisers and gunboats – becomes a form of naval racing against Pacific newly made navies. Californians and their national allies argued for a New Navy, citing fears of Chile, China, and eventually Japan. These fears were not only material, stemming from the technical inferiority of the US Old Navy, but also cultural, as naval programs in the Pacific threatened assumptions about US racial and civilizational superiority. Physically, advanced navies in the Pacific stoked fear in Californian cities about raids from the sea. Technologically, Pacific newly made navies (and especially the Chilean cruiser Esmeralda) served as yardsticks to measure US Navy progress. Culturally, the sophistication of Pacific navies undermined beliefs about the position of the United States as the most advanced nation in the hemisphere. These threats allowed navalists to make an effective argument for funding a small, cruiser-dominated New Navy in the 1880s that could in the near term compete with its Pacific rivals.

The War of the Pacific (1879–1884) and the Sino-French War (1883–1885) put the Pacific’s newly made navies to the test after a decade of naval racing. These two wars are rarely compared, despite occurring more or less contemporaneously and employing many of the same technologies. In the War of the Pacific, Chilean victory transformed the Chilean Navy into the “preponderant force in South America.” As a hemispheric matter, the Chilean newly made navy also became a credible danger to the “Old Steam Navy” and soon the US “New Navy’s” nearest pacing threat. Strategic defeat in the Sino-French War masked Chinese tactical successes that would guide the Qing Empire’s self-strengthening efforts in the coming decades. Defeat was not a refutation but rather confirmation of the need to cultivate an effective navy, spurring on the expansion of the Beiyang Fleet until it became the dominant power in Northeast Asia by the early 1890s. In an era of vicious anti-Chinese racism in the United States, the Qing’s possession of a modern navy created debate and cultural anxiety in California.

This chapter explores a hardy perennial – the meaning of the American Civil War – from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states. This marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy that it may not otherwise have deserved. It also explores how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (cell phones, social media, the internet, etc.) and other polarizing forces which have raised serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage can survive the centrifugal temptations of the new century.

For many years, the reality about the role of women in American and southern history remained the absence of scholarship about women and the absence of women in the profession. The journey of women into the world of professional historians involved overcoming many stereotypes and prejudices. A few women emerged as professional historians who made major contributions into new areas of scholarship as early as the post-World War II years, but the ratio of women to men only began to increase in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Economist Claudia Goldin identified a “quiet revolution” of women entering the history profession between 1950 and 1970, which then exploded as women rushed into the profession in force during the 1970s. The influx of talented women opened new fields of study (women, family, social history topics, etc.). This chapter examines the influence of women who shaped new areas of study while also offering new perspectives on longstanding questions of broad scholarly interest.

This chapter explores the rapid “coming apart” of white working-class communities across the American South as the New Age of Inequality (post-1980) settled in. As the economic doldrums took hold across swaths of the American South and its diaspora during the decades since 1980, social dysfunction emerged with a vengeance in white working-class communities, a phenomenon that captured national attention through J. D. Vance’s depiction in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Older industrial cites suffered and declined as the economy deindustrialized. The many challenges the faltering economy presented to white southern workers and their communities stimulated a visceral response from disaffected workers, a response manifest in angry efforts to reclaim white privilege and the aggressive championing of “traditional” values, and ultimately an unprecedented level of death and despair. The complex story of disruptive economic forces, lingering racial resentments, and fierce atavistic loyalties led white southern workers to choose clinging to cultural values over building alliances that might redress their economic grievances.

This chapter turns again to David Potter, who argued compellingly that American exceptionalism emerged neither from a practical, nonideological political genius nor a prevailing faith in an inherited ideology, but rather from the influence of widespread and enduring economic abundance on the American character. Potter’s People of Plenty argued that the broad availability of abundance became the nation’s single most defining characteristic. Potter’s argument proved especially convincing during the broadly shared prosperity of the post-World War II years. Yet Potter’s explanation never quite accounted for the enduring postbellum poverty of the American South that lingered long enough for President Franklin Roosevelt to label the South the “nation’s no. 1 economic problem” in 1938. Additionally, as the nation’s economic growth slowed significantly and inequality worsened since 1980, there are new reasons to question whether Potter’s argument can remain influential if growing economic inequality and the related class anger persists or worsens.

After the Civil War, the American South seemed to be the exception to American exceptionalism. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted, after the end of Reconstruction, the South remained “agrarian, poor, backward, and resentful; whites resenting the never-forgotten defeat and blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination imposed by whites when reconstruction ended.” Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves left the American South faced with the challenge of embarking upon the “Age of Capital” while largely bereft of capital. This chapter focuses on how the southern capital shortage turned much of the rural South into a “vast pawn shop” with financing for planting crops coming from a mortgage on a crop not yet produced. As beggars for capital, the American South became the ragged stepchild of the industrializing American economy, an economic backwater controlled by outside capital. Active economic legacies of the capital-starved South still haunt the region’s economic landscape in the form of underdeveloped human capital.

After the US Civil War, technology, expertise, and surplus materiel flowed out into the Pacific World where it was adopted by “self-strengthening” movements in Peru, Chile, China, and Japan. As leaders in the Pacific faced the threat of North Atlantic maritime power, they sought to leverage technological and tactical advances pioneered in the US Civil War. In doing so, these four states transformed in a matter of years from “navies to construct” into “newly made navies”: industrial fleets, built from little or no naval infrastructure, leveraging recent technological innovations. This chapter also explores how newly made Pacific navies performed in the War against Spain (1864–1866), the Boshin War (1868–1869), and the Japanese Expedition to Taiwan (1874). Contemporaneously, US postwar demobilization created moments of parity between the US “Old Steam Navy” and Pacific states. Most histories frame the post-Civil War period as one of US naval retrenchment and stagnation, but when framed in a transwar context, the Pacific becomes a laboratory of US-inspired innovation.