This dissertation analyzes the history of commercial aviation as an optic onto the broader history of American globalism—the set of ideas and policies that envisioned the entire world as the United States' appropriate sphere of influence. From the pioneering flights of the Wright brothers through the mass journeys of the jet age, aviation inspired Americans to re-imagine their world and the place of the United States within it. The airplane gave rise to a world with "no distant places," as Wendell Willkie proclaimed in his 1943 bestseller One World. Yet, invented on American soil and widely viewed as a symbol of national greatness, the airplane also promised to extend the United States' frontiers "to infinity," as Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe was fond of saying. Ideas about aviation thus embodied the confluence of universalism and national exceptionalism which, the dissertation argues, has defined dominant conceptions of the United States' role in the world.

Shedding fresh light on the ideological origins of U.S. global power in the twentieth century, No Distant Places explains how corporations like Pan Am, in partnership with the U.S. government, sold the very idea of the "American Century" to the public in the United States and abroad. It also emphasizes, however, that foreign governments and citizens did not passively submit to U.S. hegemony. By the late 1960s, moreover, the state of the U.S. aviation industry suggested that the nation's power was not as coherent, as confident, or as uncontested as proponents of the American Century had once assumed. The history of commercial aviation, then, not only explains the origins and ascendance of American globalism, but also reveals its limits, contradictions, and challenges.