Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air

She's Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University.

And here's her book, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy.

Van Vleck’s first book, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013. It examines how aviation facilitated the United States’ rise as a global power—and transformed American visions of the world—from the Wright brothers through the jet age. Empire of the Air received the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize from Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and it was the runner-up for the Stuart Bernath Prize and the Myra Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.