Starting in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Manifest Destiny was born, Kaplan travels to the great cities of the heartland, to St. Louis and Omaha, down through California, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, up to Montana and Canada, and back through Oregon. He visits Mexican border settlements and dust-blown county sheriffs offices, Indian reservations and nuclear bomb plants, cattle ranches in the Oklahoma Panhandle, glacier-mantled forests in the Pacific Northwest, swanky gated communities and grim bus terminals, and comes, at last, to the great battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where an earlier generation of Americans gave their lives for their vision of an American future.

At Vicksburg, Kaplan contemplates the new America through which he has just traveled -- an America of sharply polarized communities that draws its population from pools of talent far beyond its borders; an America where the distance between winners and losers grows exponentially as corporations assume government functions and the wealthy find themselves more closely linked to their business associates in India and China than to their poorer neighbors a few miles away; an America where old loyalties and allegiances are vanishing and new ones are only beginning to emerge. The new America he found is in the pages of this book. Kaplan gives a precise and chilling vision of how the most successful nation the worldhas ever known is entering the final, and highly uncertain, phase of its history.