This seminar is inspired by recent public and scholarly debates about American borders and boundaries, globalization, “Exceptionalism,” the “War on Terror,” and other aspects of U.S. regional and global presence. The course’s diachronic axis begins with Thomas Jefferson’s notion of “Empire of Liberty,” and continues with “Manifest Destiny,” western expansion, colonial escapades in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the U.S. ascendance throughout the “American Century,” and struggles over America’s engagement with the rest of the world in the twenty-first century. Conversely, we will consider the American perception of the outside world, and the global presence in the U.S., the worlding of America. Thematically, the course highlights the complex roles that race, gender, modern capitalism, and popular culture have had in shaping America’s place in the world, imperial ideologies, and systems of control, domination, and acculturation inside and outside the formal boundaries of the U.S.