An edition of An empire wilderness (1998)

An Empire Wilderness

Travels into America's Future

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Last edited by MARC Bot
July 14, 2024 | History
An edition of An empire wilderness (1998)

An Empire Wilderness

Travels into America's Future

  • 2 Want to read

Traveling, like Tocqueville and John Gunther before him, through a political and cultural landscape in transition, Kaplan reveals a nation shedding a familiar identity as it assumes a radically new one. An Empire Wilderness opens in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the first white settlers moved into Indian country and where Manifest Destiny was born. In a world whose future conflicts can barely be imagined, it is also the place where the army trains its men to fight the next war.

From Fort Leavenworth, Kaplan travels west to the great cities of the heartland - to St. Louis, once a glorious shipping center expected to outshine imperial Rome and now touted, with its desolate inner city and miles of suburban gated communities, as "the most average American city." Kaplan continues west to Omaha; down through California; north from Mexico, 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 postsuburban sprawls 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.

But what, if anything, he asks, will today's Americans fight and die for? 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 world has ever known is entering the final, and highly uncertain, phase of its history.

Publish Date
Publisher
Vintage
Language
English
Pages
416

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: An Empire Wilderness
An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future
September 7, 1999, Vintage
Paperback in English
Cover of: An empire wilderness
An empire wilderness: travels into America's future
1998, Random House
in English - 1st ed.

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Book Details


First Sentence

"WHEREAS EAST COAST monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty speak specifically to ideals, the Protestant memorial chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas-overlooking the Missouri River at the edge of the Great Plains, with the rails of the Union Pacific visible in the distance-invokes blood and soil."

The Physical Object

Format
Paperback
Number of pages
416
Dimensions
7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
Weight
11.7 ounces

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL7701171M
Internet Archive
empirewilderness0000kapl_m0y8
ISBN 10
0679776877
ISBN 13
9780679776871
Library Thing
51224
Amazon ID (ASIN)
Goodreads
335217

First Sentence

"WHEREAS EAST COAST monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty speak specifically to ideals, the Protestant memorial chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas-overlooking the Missouri River at the edge of the Great Plains, with the rails of the Union Pacific visible in the distance-invokes blood and soil."

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July 14, 2024 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
December 17, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
October 5, 2021 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
August 6, 2021 Edited by New York Times Bestsellers Bot Add NYT review links
December 9, 2009 Created by WorkBot add works page