Pacific Destiny: Manifestly American - An interview and book signing with Richard Abrams, Ph.D., author of America Transformed (Cambridge University Press, 2006)During its history the United States was mainly Euro-centered, but in the past sixty years it turned toward the Pacific. Japan and China became our leading trading partners, Korea and Vietnam became our wars. California replaced New York in population and gross state product, East Asia and Latin America replaced Western and Eastern Europe in emigration. From Microsoft and Boeing in the Seattle area, Intel and Genentech in the Bay Area, and the entertainment industry in the L.A. basin, America’s West Coast is ‘the’ coast. Abrams’s subtitle says it all: “Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1942-2001.”

Richard M. Abrams, Ph.D., is UC Berkeley’s leading 20th century historian of all things American. Trained at Columbia University, he has taught at Berkeley since 1961. This book “synthesizes the scholarly wisdom of a lifetime.”

Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Ph.D., Senior Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim, will moderate.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Reservations recommended. Please call (415) 422-6828.

Cosponsored by the World Affairs Council of Northern California, the Mechanics’ Institute, the USF Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, and the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning. Funded by the Kiriyama Chair for Pacific Rim Studies at USF.