America’s new global power after 1945 was central to the rise of universal human rights as a set of practices and ideals. The new moral language thrived when it received official US backing and usually withered when it did not. Domestic and transnational movements also laid claim to these ideals to press for changes in how states treat their own citizens. Over time their efforts enshrined a view of individual rights as the business of the international community and the domain of international law rather than a matter of strictly internal sovereignty. As the language became global, the rest of the world harnessed and contested human rights ideals in ways that changed Americans’ own aspirations at home and abroad.

The world consumes America. It drinks Coca-Cola and Starbucks coffee; it eats American fast food. McDonald’s has close to 37,000 franchises in more than 120 countries, while Starbucks has around 28,000 shops in 76 countries. Coca-Cola has been the official sponsor of the Olympic Games since 1928. The world also consumes American cultural products: Hollywood’s movie industry has dominated the global market since the 1920s, and American popular music has had a worldwide audience, influencing the production of music everywhere. Because the United States has arguably been the biggest producer of consumer goods in the global marketplace since the early twentieth century, the global distribution and consumption of these products was frequently equated with “Americanization.” The United States’ cultural products, such as film and popular music, followed and often became inextricably entwined with its consumer goods.

In 1903, friends of poet Emma Lazarus installed a plaque on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor bearing text from one of her poems. It read, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” Yet at the time the poem was added to the statue, free and unfettered immigration – such as it ever was – was already in the past, and an increasingly restrictive regime of migrant policing and border control had begun to emerge. Over the course of the four decades that followed, the US government laid the legal and bureaucratic groundwork that would govern migration in and out of the country and define the concept of border security for the next century. Ever-present surges of nativism and concern over the potential threats to national security posed by unregulated immigration helped to guide the direction of these changes. In these decades, the United States developed a comprehensive body of immigration law, consolidated control over national borders, entrenched extraterritorial control over visas, and came to consider migration more explicitly in terms of national security, economic strength, and demographic solidarity. Alongside these new controls – and sometimes in spite of them – millions of new immigrants poured into the United States, changing the cultural and demographic landscape of the country and complicating definitions of what it meant to be an American.

The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the United States from an insecure association of erstwhile colonies to a continental empire with a global reach. Though forged in a struggle for independence from the British Empire, the United States became a formidable empire in its own right. Historians have long recognized the significance of this transition for the United States and the world, but they have given different meanings to it over time and place. In contrast to critics in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other loci of anti-imperialist sentiment, most US scholars writing before the Vietnam War and contemporaneous civil rights movement regarded the “rise” of the United States as something to be celebrated. America’s republican institutions, in this telling, challenged the oppressive monarchical order of the Old World, while white settlers’ march across the North American “frontier” gave birth to an exceptionally democratic national character.

The Cambridge History of America and the World (CHAW) offers a far-reaching and novel account of American engagement in the world from 1500 to the present day. CHAW takes as its interpretive starting point a deceptively simple insight: adopting frameworks that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders could upend established stories and generate new interpretive possibilities. What might happen, as nineteenth-century American historian Thomas Bender asked in a seminal 2002 essay, if historians followed “the movement of people, capital, things, and knowledge” across borders in ways that ignored artificial and state-defined boundaries? An outpouring of work over the last two decades has followed this transnational turn in US history to deprovincialize how we understand the American past. It has now produced a fundamentally new history of America and the world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois prophesied in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind” (1897), as well as in “Address to the Nations of the World” (1900), and, most notably, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the color line – the relation of the “darker to the lighter races of men” – was the defining problem of the era. The onset of World War I gave these insights credence: the imperialist rivalry for the booty on offer from Africa not least drove the conflict, he argued in “The African Roots of War,” as Berlin sought its place in the sun and aimed to displace London in particular.

American responses to refugee dilemmas in the decades following the Cold War in many ways mirrored the country’s broader and often ambivalent attempts to redefine itself as an enduring global hegemon over that period. During the Cold War, American refugee advocates within and outside of government had promoted refugee assistance as an important tool for advancing US influence internationally, part of the country’s “arsenal of peace” and “strategy of freedom” as one government official put it. Such initiatives purportedly heralded to global and American audiences alike the country’s commitment not only to such soft-power principles of international humanitarianism and an American way of life that welcomed immigrants into a prosperous land of freedom; they were additionally designed to signal America’s prudent, hard-nosed concern with promoting international stability and US national interests, especially in the struggle against communism. As Americans considered what role the United States should play in a post-Cold War world that President George H. W.

The American Revolution freed North American colonists from the restrictions Britain had placed on their encroachments into indigenous lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. The independence of the United States thus catalyzed what became a more than century-long campaign of what this chapter calls settler-led colonialism. This system was characterized by the conquest of indigenous lands, the taking of indigenous resources, and the expulsion of the indigenous people who had for untold millennia served as the stewards and protectors of their ancestral territories. The central goal of settler-led colonialism was clearing the land of indigenous people, by whatever means necessary, and replacing them with white re-settlers, who brought with them their own culture and way of life and, in many cases, enslaved workers. This objective, as historian Patrick Wolfe argues, was inherently genocidal.

The October 1954 issue of Pageant magazine featured a quiz for its readers to take in the privacy of their homes: “Are You Sure You Are a Good Security Risk?” The feature can be read as a humorous challenge to the red- and lavender-baiting associated with the era in the United States often known as “McCarthyism,” an ode to the aggressive anticommunist – and, no doubt, homophobic – rhetoric and policy work that took the namesake of one of its most fervent peddlers, Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican, Wisconsin). The quiz began: “You and every man and woman of average intelligence in America are familiar with the term ‘security risk.’ You probably could make a pretty fair stab at explaining it generally as a phrase that’s applied to a government employe [sic] who is known or suspected to be a spy or traitor, a Communist or a fellow-traveler who, for these or many other reasons, could be dangerous to the U.S.”

In the spring of 1903 the front pages of newspapers across the United States featured three stories about Russia that sparked widespread discussion. From the Russian capital, St. Petersburg, came the stunning news that Tsar Nicholas II had issued an Edict of Toleration that would grant Russian subjects the freedom to worship according to their consciences. Although skeptics stressed the vagueness of the proclamation and doubted that it would alleviate discrimination against Jews, enthusiasts compared it to the freeing of Russian serfs by Alexander II forty years earlier and anticipated that it would open the way to a broad regeneration of Russia.

Infused with common transnational sensibilities, this novel scholarship has taken a variety of interpretative paths. Some of these new histories were pioneered by diplomatic historians who increasingly placed the perceptions and policies of presidents, diplomats, and generals on a global stage or employed new and sometimes non-American based archives to illuminate the perspectives of non-state actors from the worlds of business, activism, religion, and what we now call nongovernmental organizations. Other scholars have crafted social and cultural histories, offering a wider vision of American engagement in the world by exploring how the construction of American state and society has intersected with global forces and contestations over identity abroad. At the same time this work shares many of the convictions that have animated new work on the Atlantic World, slavery, borderlands, migration and the environment, and in critical race and queer studies. In all these ways, historians have embraced multiple transnational optics to reimagine how US history was made.

Wendell Willkie’s One World, published in 1943 at the height of World War II, quickly became a spectacular best seller. A stirring call for a new international order rooted in cooperation and unity, the book captured the aspirations of countless Americans, to say nothing of the wider world, who hoped for something better at the end of all the bloodshed. But Willkie’s vision also appealed because it seemed attainable. During an around-the-world tour, Willkie found governments and peoples eager to submerge their narrow interests within supranational structures that would serve the common good. “It is inescapable that there can be no peace for any part of the world,” wrote Willkie, “unless the foundations of peace are made secure throughout all parts of the world.”

Imperial visions of the world in US culture from 1945 to the present follow an arc moving from a robust and confident empire that insisted that it was not an empire, but the legitimate leader of the free world, to visions of a troubled empire, dark, morally ambiguous, and embattled from without and within. Exploring popular culture as a critical space of meaning making, fundamental to understanding how Americans imaged themselves in the world, this chapter charts an uneven zig-zag in dominant American constructions of empire. It begins with archetypical cultural expressions of the US relation to the non-American world in the 1950s that celebrated a robust “American Century.” Moving forward, with domestic and global challenges to US racism and the American war in Vietnam, ideas of American innocence and images of US as a benevolent force for good in the world began to unravel. With the exceptionalist narrative in disarray by the mid-1970s, far more critical and/or ambivalent renderings of the role of the US in the world emerged.

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson’s case for entering World War I (then known as the Great War) relied heavily on allegations that Germany was flouting international law by using U-boats to sink merchant and passenger ships traveling between the United States and the Allied nations, primarily Great Britain and France. Two and a half years after the war began, Wilson asserted that it was time to put neutrality aside.