America is the first world power to inhabit an immense land mass open at both ends to the world’s two largest oceans—the Atlantic and the Pacific. This gives America a great competitive advantage often overlooked by Atlanticists, whose focus remains overwhelmingly fixed on America’s relationship with Europe. Bruce Cumings challenges the Atlanticist perspective in this innovative new history, arguing that relations with Asia influenced our history greatly.
Cumings chronicles how the movement westward, from the Middle West to the Pacific, has shaped America’s industrial, technological, military, and global rise to power. He unites domestic and international history, international relations, and political economy to demonstrate how technological change and sharp economic growth have created a truly bicoastal national economy that has led the world for more than a century. Cumings emphasizes the importance of American encounters with Mexico, the Philippines, and the nations of East Asia. The result is a wonderfully integrative history that advances a strong argument for a dual approach to American history incorporating both Atlanticist and Pacificist perspectives.

Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power

History

Cumings, Bruce

Americas

Yale University Press

From the author of The Origins of the Korean War, this book “faces West” to focus on the importance of the Pacific Coast in a boldly original reinterpretation of the American ascendency. America is the first world power to inhabit an immense land mass open at both ends to the world’s two largest oceans—the Atlantic and the Pacific. This gives America a great competitive advantage often overlooked by Atlanticists, whose focus remains overwhelmingly fixed on America’s relationship with Europe. Bruce Cumings challenges the Atlanticist perspective in this innovative new history, arguing that relations with Asia influenced our history greatly.
Cumings chronicles how the movement westward, from the Middle West to the Pacific, has shaped America’s industrial, technological, military, and global rise to power. He unites domestic and international history, international relations, and political economy to demonstrate how technological change and sharp economic growth have created a truly bicoastal national economy that has led the world for more than a century. Cumings emphasizes the importance of American encounters with Mexico, the Philippines, and the nations of East Asia. The result is a wonderfully integrative history that advances a strong argument for a dual approach to American history incorporating both Atlanticist and Pacificist perspectives.

Business & Money

Economics

An authoritative, narrative chronicle of modern Korea focuses on the country's turbulent twentieth-century history, discussing its 1910 loss of independence, its years under Japanese rule, its division and the Korean War, and its postwar recovery and economic growth.

Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History

Asia

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

A narrative chronicle of modern Korea focuses on the country's turbulent twentieth-century history, discussing its 1910 loss of independence, its years under Japanese rule, its division and the Korean War, and its postwar recovery and economic growth

The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)

Reference

Modern Library

In continuing his argument that the Korean War was civil and revolutionary in character, Bruce Cumings examines the internal political-economic development of the two Korean states and the consequences, for Korea, of Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. He investigates the intense border fighting and internal political instability that preceded the Northern invasion and challenges the notion of sudden Soviet-sponsored intervention. "A decade ago, Bruce Cumings opened a new chapter in Korean War studies by arguing that this horrible conflict was above all a civil war. The Roaring of the Cataract is on a grander scale and narrated in a freer, more indignant voice than the first volume....there is no better camera obscura for those daring to revisit the bloodbaths that convulsed Korea at mid-century."--Far Eastern Economic Review

Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950

Princeton University Press

In continuing his argument that the Korean War was civil and revolutionary in character, Bruce Cumings examines the internal political-economic development of the two Korean states and the consequences, for Korea, of Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. He investigates the intense border fighting and internal political instability that preceded the Northern invasion and challenges the notion of sudden Soviet-sponsored intervention. "A decade ago, Bruce Cumings opened a new chapter in Korean War studies by arguing that this horrible conflict was above all a civil war. The Roaring of the Cataract is on a grander scale and narrated in a freer, more indignant voice than the first volume....there is no better camera obscura for those daring to revisit the bloodbaths that convulsed Korea at mid-century."--Far Eastern Economic Review

The Origins of the Korean War: Volume II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950

The description for this book, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, will be forthcoming.

The Origins of the Korean War, Volume I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947 (Studies of the East Asian Institute)

Military

A BRACING ACCOUNT OF A WAR THAT IS EITHER MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, OR WILLFULLY IGNORED For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its origin as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America’s post–World War II occupation of Korea, reveals untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, exposing as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides. Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, The Korean War is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential.

In a work that synthesizes crucial developments in international relations at the close of the twentieth century, Bruce Cumings—a leading historian of contemporary East Asia—provides a nuanced understanding of how the United States has loomed over the modern history and culture of East Asia. By offering correctives to widely held yet largely inaccurate assessments of the affairs of this region, Parallax Visions shows how relations between the United States, Japan, Vietnam, North and South Korea, China, and Taiwan have been structured by their perceptions and misperceptions of each other.Using information based on thirty years of research, Cumings offers a new perspective on a wide range of issues that originated with the cold war—with particular focus on the possibly inappropriate collaboration between universities, foundations, and intelligence agencies. Seeking to explode the presuppositions that Americans usually bring to the understanding of our relations with East Asia, the study ranges over much of the history of the twentieth century in East Asian–American relations—Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean War, and more recent difficulties in U.S. relations with China and Japan. Cumings also rebuts U.S. media coverage of North Korea’s nuclear diplomacy in the 1990s and examines how experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism have had varying effects on economic development in each of these countries. Positing that the central defining experience of twentieth-century East Asia has been its entanglement first with British and Japanese imperialism, and then with the United States, Cumings ends with a discussion of how the situation could change over the next century as the economic and political global clout of the United States declines.Illuminating the sometimes self-deluded ideology of cold war America, Parallax Visions will engage historians, political scientists, and students and scholars of comparative politics and social theory, as well as readers interested in questions of modernity and the role of the United States in shaping the destinies of modernizing societies in Asia.

Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

Duke University Press Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cumings, Bruce. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cumings, Bruce

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cumings, Bruce. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power

Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power

Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History

Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History

The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)

Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950

The Origins of the Korean War: Volume II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950

The Origins of the Korean War, Volume I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947 (Studies of the East Asian Institute)

The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)

Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)