This proposed AHA roundtable brings together scholars working on diverse aspects of the histories of the infrastructures that connected the United States to the wider world. The first purpose of this session is to shine a light on the various forms of infrastructure that have conditioned American engagement with foreign peoples, markets, and ideas. Panelists are actively engaged in research projects on the history of specific infrastructures, including credit systems, expatriate social institutions, steam transport, Indigenous trails, and big carbon systems. While acknowledging the differences within the particular types of infrastructures, the panel will focus on the overall picture that emerges when considering these various forms of infrastructure together. In other words, the roundtable will explore how transnational/transimperial connections were the creations of infrastructural development. Here we arrive at the second objective of the panel, which is historiographical. Most of the histories of infrastructure have zoomed in on specific forms, without much attention to the wider project of infrastructural history. For example, the rich historiography on steamships has developed without engagement with the literature on electrification, and so on. The panelists thus will consider how the particular literatures from which their research arises relate to one another, emphasizing methods that can be exchanged and pitfalls that can be avoided. Another dimension to the historiographic dimension of the panel is to engage with the literatures on infrastructure from other geographic areas (ie other national and imperial historiographies) and chronological eras.