Shaping Our Nation

Book excerpt: "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 State