Shaping Our Nation ─ How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics

New York Times bestselling author, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Fox News contributor Michael Barone reveals the power and lasting influence of migrations on American history, economics, politics, and culture over the last three centuries.

If you could be transported back in time 400 years and view the world in 1600, you would find most of the concentrations of population--China, India, the Muslim world, Western Europe, and Russia--very familiar. But North America then was vastly different from today. It was not vacant, but Indian civilizations had only the slightest of connections to the more advanced societies of Europe and Asia, and their peoples were to suffer from enormous depopulation due to diseases for which they had no immunity.

In their place today, in vivid contrast with the years around 1600, is a nation with 5 percent of the world's population that produces 25 percent of its economic product and deploys more than 50 percent of its military capacity, a nation in which only 1 percent of its current population claims ancestry from the peoples variously called American Indians or Native Americans. The United States is by definition the cumulative product of successive migrations, first from across the oceans and then also within the nation itself. This book tells the story of how surges of migration of great magnitude shaped and reshaped America.

MICHAEL BARONE is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and author of the New York Times bestseller Our First Revolution and Hard America, Soft America. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is also a Fox News Channel contributor and coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. His column is published Wednesdays and Sundays. He blogs regularly for the Examiner's Beltway Confidential site.