In this monumental story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn dismantles the conventional histories of the 19th century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and is throughout internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of sectionalism, emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the Northeast and the Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi West, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the West as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. It identifies a sweeping era of reconstructions in the late-19th and early 20th centuries that laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy simultaneously.