United States

The United States is a modern empire built inside a republic: a country founded on ideals of liberty and equality that has repeatedly struggled to live up to them. Its story runs through Indigenous worlds, settler expansion, slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, mass immigration, global war, and a 20th-century rise to unmatched economic and military power. America’s influence is not just geopolitical. It shapes the rules of global finance, the architecture of the internet, and much of the world’s popular culture. At the same time, its internal tensions—race and citizenship, faith and secularism, markets and inequality, freedom and security—remain the defining drama of its public life. To understand the modern world, you need a working model of how the U.S. was made—and why it keeps remaking itself.

1. 1 U.S. political polarization and institutional stress are a live test case for whether large democracies can govern effectively.
2. 2 America’s role in NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and global security continues to shape the risk landscape for allies and rivals alike.
3. 3 U.S. monetary policy, tech regulation, and industrial strategy ripple through every major economy and supply chain.
4. 4 Migration and border politics—especially across North America—sit at the center of domestic debate and regional stability.
5. 5 American culture and platforms (film, music, social media, AI ecosystems) still set global defaults for what feels “modern.”