Summary
Historian Simon Schama offers an essential historical perspective on the 2008 presidential election and its importance for reclaiming America's original ideal and takes a long look at the multiple crises besetting the United States and asks how these problems look in the mirror of time. In four cruc... Full description
- Prologue : Iowa waltz
- Part I : American war
- Veterans Day : 11 November 2007
- The fight for the citadel : soldiering and the Founding Fathers
- The Drop Zone Cafe, San Antonio, Texas, 3 March 2008
- The trials of the Roman
- Taking sides
- Father and son
- The quartermaster general 1861-1864
- John Rodgers Meigs, the Shenandoah Valley, summer and fall 1864
- Montgomery Meigs and Louisa Rodgers Meigs, October 1864-December 1865
- Washington D.C., February 2008
- Hamilton resurrexit
- American war : Rohrbach-lès-Bitche, the Maginot Line near Metz, 10 December 1944
- Part II : American fervor
- Atlantic City, August 1964
- Saved
- Raven, Virginia, 2008
- Providence
- "Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free
- "
- National sin
- Jarena Lee
- The sovereignty of the voice
- Easter Sunday, 2008, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta
- Great white hopes?
- Ruleville, Mississippi, 31 August 1962
- Part III : What is an American?
- Twilight, Downing Street, June 2008
- Citizen Heartbreak : France, August 1794
- The German threat
- The Chicken Club, south Texas, July 2008
- The immigrant problem in Texas
- The German threat - again
- The importance of Fred Bee
- Grace under pressure
- Jefferson's Koran
- Part IV : American plenty
- Running on empty?
- Strawberry fields, 1775
- White Path, 1801-1823
- 1893
- The church of irrigation
- Ghost house
- Roll up that lawn
- Windmills
- Epilogue: The impotent angel?