This book features the 21st-century United States through the lens of global history. What road did Americans travel to reach global preeminence? Taking the long historical view, Hunt demonstrates that wealth, confidence, and leadership were key elements to America's ascent. In an analytic narrative that illuminates the past rather than indulges in political triumphalism, he provides crucial insights into the country's problematic place in the world today. Hunt charts America's rise to global power from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a culminating multilayered dominance achieved in the mid-twentieth century. He examines how the United States remade great power relations, fashioned limits for the third world, and shaped the current international economic and cultural order. Hunt concludes by addressing current issues, such as how durable American power really is and what options remain for America's future.

"Should be on the desk of every candidate for national office." - American Historical Review "Explains how a weak and peripheral New World republic turned itself into the preeminent power of the twentieth century." - Foreign Affairs"

MICHAEL H. HUNT is Everett H. Emerson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of nine previous books, including The World Transformed: 1945 to the Present; Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968; and Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy.