On Election Day 2008, we look back on America’s first tumultuous decades and the triumphs and compromises of the Republic’s creation.

In storybook America, when folks sit down at the barbeque, at the bar, at the town bowling alley, at the local cafe, they come in all political and cultural stripes.
Conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Democrats, independents — all rubbing elbows, pitching in their two cents, hashing out the way of a great democracy.
In real America today, says [...]

Global big thinker Fareed Zakaria is out with his latest big book, and the title almost says it all: It’s “The Post-American World.”
Take a look at the world and it’s not hard to see: the world’s tallest buildings, biggest airplane, biggest investment fund, biggest movie industry, biggest refinery, biggest casino — heck, the world’s biggest [...]

It’s not easy being Blessed Boykin, Sweet Pitts or Just Desire. But if that’s what your parents named you, that’s what you live with.
And the archives of American names recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau are full of doozeys. Good Knight. Sweet Prince. Zombie Davenport. Hysteria Johnson. Not to mention, of course, the timeless Ima [...]

From the misty, half-attuned, still-in-the-American-Century shores of the United States, China and India can look like peas in a pod: two rising Asian giants with screaming growth rates and lots of what used to be American jobs.
Look closer, and these are very different cats. China is the factory floor and India the back-office, software shop. [...]

In the 1990s, when China’s fabled Shaolin Temple was celebrating its 1500th anniversary as a center of Zen Buddhism and kung fu, American college student Matthew Polly was on a pilgrimage of his own.
The skinny kid from Topeka, Kansas who had grown up on Star Wars and David Carradine was leaving Princeton University to look [...]

The big GM wobble this week over workers and wages and whether its factories will be built in this country was just one more wake-up call. The old world is gone and the new one is going to require a lot more innovation if America is going to stay at the top of the economic [...]

It’s been a long time in the wilderness. But the “Made in the USA” label is packing some cachet again. After poison toys from China, job losses, and eco-disaster images of filthy smokestacks abroad, Americans are getting the itch to buy American again: toys, bikes, even t-shirts.
Some never lost the urge. But in the age [...]