Introduction: The American abracadabra

Columbia : the birth of the American order

Exceptional and exceptionally vague : the dangers of a safe founding story

Landfall : the religion of work

Earn this : the impossible immigrant binary

Fording the river : big business and the frontier mirage

Right of way : the tall myth of the maverick

Bustle : work theater and the death of leisure

Hustle : the impossible act of keeping up

Worth : the wages of going it alone

Small normalcies : a new national story

Automatic for the people : the postworker future

Blindness : the crisis of American self-estrangement.