In a series of penetrating reflections on the United States and its institutions in the post-9/11 world, this book offers some answers to questions that people at home and abroad have begun to ask about our country. How did it attain its international preeminence? What exactly is this richest, most powerful of countries made of? Where will its unmatched influence lead? Military historian Frederick Kagan discusses the future of our armed forces and the challenges they will face in defending America's unique position. David B. Hart shows how religion, with all its variety and occasional excess, is "alive and striving in America, with the power to shelter many virtues under its promises of supernatural grace." From the future of the law to the future of higher education, from music to the visual arts, Lengthened Shadows provides a unique situation report on American culture today. Writers and thinkers such as Robert Bork, Hilton Kramer, Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn offer a probing assessment of the institutions that organize our lives--their health, their influence and their prospects--at the beginning of what some commentators are calling "the next American century."