This volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World opens as World War II ends and the United States stands at the pinnacle of its power relative to the rest of the world. Indexes of that power abound: In 1950, for instance, the United States accounted for only 6.0 percent of the world population – but 27.3 percent of all economic activity (and a far larger share of industrial production), along with 66.3 percent of world military expenditure. Other forms of American global power were just as significant but harder to measure: the United States had taken the lead diplomatically, treating wartime allies like England and France as junior partners; it took a harsher attitude toward its other major wartime ally, the USSR. Economic and military strength, along with the ability to shape world politics – these very real and concrete forms of global power – were hardly the only dimensions of American power in the decades since World War II.

Images of Islam matter a great deal in US culture and in US–Middle East relations. Unquestionably, modern film, television, news media, literature and visual culture all offer perceptions of the Middle East. The images they produce are varied although it is clear that the history of representing Islam is hardly salutary. After 9/11 the intensity of American fascination with Islam increased dramatically, as did the number – and the diversity – of US representations. One simple but fundamental argument of this essay is that these media images do not operate in simple or one-dimensional fashion. We cannot understand the impact of the media by cataloguing stereotypes or by assessing how many “negative” or “positive” images appear in the media. Instead, we can learn more about the role of culture when we ask how perceptions of Islam work in the United States, for whom and to what end.

There is not, of course, just one “Western” culture, just as there is no one Islam and no single set of images that can capture the diversity of the Muslim World. Even if we just focus on the United States, as I will in this essay, we are immediately confronted with the reality that there are multiple communities with quite different investments—from Hollywood filmmakers to small town preachers to news show pundits to undergraduate majors in Middle Eastern studies. In recent years Muslim Americans have become self-consciously involved in attempting to shape perceptions, producing literature and scholarship and commenting in the news media.