Jean Heffer's book is a translation from a French edition published in 1995 in the collection L'Evolution de l'humanité by Editions Albin Michel. The work is a synthesis of United States history in the Pacific.

The author uses the concept of a dynamic frontier moving from the American shores to Asia. Heffer considers the Pacific Ocean, “as it is usually defined by oceanologists, i.e., ending at the Bering Strait in the north and including the seas along the Asian continent in the west, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Java Sea, and washing the eastern coast of Australia” (p. 5). This choice avoids the customary pitfalls of studies that ignore some of the identifiable regions that form part of the Pacific.