Jenifer Van Vleck. Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy.

Most aviation history books are written by specialists for specialists who have an abiding interest in the minutia surrounding specific aircraft types and individual aviators, while ignoring larger questions of significance and meaning. In the late 1980s a group of leading aviation history scholars called for more works to address “aviation history in the wider view,” synthesizing aviation history into the larger streams of historical analysis (James R. Hansen, “Aviation History in the Wider View,” Technology and Culture 30, no. 3 [1989]: 643–656). This book is one of the finest examples to date of such scholarship as it effectively brings aviation into the expanding field of study called “the new global history.” Jenifer Van Vleck's compelling book “reframes the global history of the American Century by following the course of U.S. aviation from the early 1900s through the 1970s, from the pioneering flights of the Wright brothers through the mass journeys of the jet age” (p. 5).