Infused with common transnational sensibilities, this novel scholarship has taken a variety of interpretative paths. Some of these new histories were pioneered by diplomatic historians who increasingly placed the perceptions and policies of presidents, diplomats, and generals on a global stage or employed new and sometimes non-American based archives to illuminate the perspectives of non-state actors from the worlds of business, activism, religion, and what we now call nongovernmental organizations. Other scholars have crafted social and cultural histories, offering a wider vision of American engagement in the world by exploring how the construction of American state and society has intersected with global forces and contestations over identity abroad. At the same time this work shares many of the convictions that have animated new work on the Atlantic World, slavery, borderlands, migration and the environment, and in critical race and queer studies. In all these ways, historians have embraced multiple transnational optics to reimagine how US history was made.