In this powerful exploration, Thomas Nast's timeless cartoons come to life in a sweeping critique of America's rise and fall. As the nation's founding ideals are tested and its values questioned, Nast reveals the dark underbelly of American society.

From the triumphs of the Westward Expansion to the ravages of industrialization, Nast pokes fun at the country's vaunted optimism. His cartoons skewer America's pretensions as a beacon of freedom, revealing instead the contradictions and hypocrisies that have come to define its greatest achievements.

This collection of essays is a searing indictment of America's flawed values: its obsession with growth and profit over people and the planet; its vaunted meritocracy eclipsed by entrenched inequality; its fetishization of consumerism as a moral imperative. Through Nast's cartoons, we are forced to confront our own complicity in this toxic trajectory.

Read "The Decline and Fall" to experience the most biting critique of American society since Marx's "Das Kapital". This is not a nostalgic look back at America's past; it's a searing examination of its present.