Concerns about rights in the United States have a long history, but the articulation of global human rights in the twentieth century was something altogether different. Global human rights offered individuals unprecedented guarantees beyond the nation for the protection of political, economic, social and cultural freedoms. The World Reimagined explores how these revolutionary developments first became believable to Americans in the 1940s and the 1970s through everyday vernaculars as they emerged in political and legal thought, photography, film, novels, memoirs and soundscapes. Together, they offered fundamentally novel ways for Americans to understand what it means to feel free, culminating in today's ubiquitous moral language of human rights. Set against a sweeping transnational canvas, the book presents a new history of how Americans thought and acted in the twentieth-century world.

The Cambridge History of America and the World offers a transformative account of American engagement in the world from 1500 to the present. Representing a new scholarship informed by the transnational turn in the writing of US history and American foreign relations, the four-volume reference work gives sustained attention to key moments in US diplomacy, from the Revolutionary War and the Monroe Doctrine to the US rise as a world power in World War I, World War II and the Cold War. The volumes also cast a more inclusive scholarly net to include transnational histories of Native America, the Atlantic world, slavery, political economy, borderlands, empire, the family, gender and sexuality, race, technology, and the environment. Collectively, they offer essential starting points for readers coming to the field for the first time and serve as a critical vehicle for moving this scholarship forward in innovative new directions.

The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism? Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent 'forever' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

Concerns about rights in the United States have a long history, but the articulation of global human rights in the twentieth century was something altogether different. Global human rights offered individuals unprecedented guarantees beyond the nation for the protection of political, economic, social and cultural freedoms. The World Reimagined explores how these revolutionary developments first became believable to Americans in the 1940s and the 1970s through everyday vernaculars as they emerged in political and legal thought, photography, film, novels, memoirs and soundscapes. Together, they offered fundamentally novel ways for Americans to understand what it means to feel free, culminating in today's ubiquitous moral language of human rights. Set against a sweeping transnational canvas, the book presents a new history of how Americans thought and acted in the twentieth-century world.

In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation's borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley's painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey's reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker's banana skirt and William Howard Taft's underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.Contributors: Brooke L. Blower, Boston University; Mark Philip Bradley, University of Chicago; Nick Cullather, Indiana University; Brian DeLay, University of California-Berkeley; Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University; Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University; Mary A. Renda, Mount Holyoke College; Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University; Andrew J. Rotter, Colgate University; Brian Rouleau, Texas A&M University; Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University

This study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950 reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the 20th century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain and the United States. Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in America's image. Contrary to other historians who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated in - and ultimately transcended - the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations.

In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation's borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and William Howard Taft’s underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.Contributors: Brooke L. Blower, Boston University; Mark Philip Bradley, University of Chicago; Nick Cullather, Indiana University; Brian DeLay, University of California–Berkeley; Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University; Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor; Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University; Mary A. Renda, Mount Holyoke College; Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University; Andrew J. Rotter, Colgate University; Brian Rouleau, Texas A&M University; Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University