unopposed across the U.S. in regions where their nationals have been attacked—a common occurrence, as many rural areas are poorly governed and lawlessness is rampant in them; highwaymen are a constant threat to the few travelers. The long-standing economic depression has led to a rather puritanical culture favoring late marriage and few children in each family. This, combined with a ban on immigration and the emigration of ambitious young people, has resulted in an overall declining population. Higher education is in a state of decay, being more concerned with status than education, with faculty members being constantly scrutinized and summarily fired if they demonstrate "abnormal ideas", reminiscent of McCarthyism. Plot The narrator of the novel is Hodgins "Hodge" McCormick Backmaker, who writes a diary of his life in our timeline, year 1877. Hodge was born in 1921 in the alternate timeline in Wappingers Falls, Dutchess County, New York. In 1938 at age 17, he travels to New York City, the largest city of the United States (and yet a backwater compared to some Confederate cities), in a desperate attempt to gain admittance to a college or university. After being robbed of his few possessions, he comes into contact with the "Grand Army", a nationalistic organization working to restore the United States to its former glory through acts of sabotage and terrorism. One of the Grand Army's operations involves counterfeiting Spanish currency, with the goal of provoking war between the Confederacy and the German Union in Spanish territories, sparing the U.S. from becoming the two superpowers' battlefield. Despite remaining critical of the organization's activities, Hodge accepts work and lodging with a Grand Army member working from a bookshop. Content to work for food and the opportunity to read at every waking hour, Hodge stays in the bookshop for six years. (Young Hodge's life is largely autobiographical of Ward Moore.) One friend he meets during this time is Consul Enfandin, an emissary of the Republic of Haiti, the only independent American republic south of the Mason–Dixon line. Hodge leaves New York in 1944 for rural Pennsylvania, where his aspiration of becoming a historian, specializing in the war between North and South, becomes a reality when he is invited to join a co-operative society named Haggershaven. The society was founded by the children of a Confederate Major named Herbert Haggerwells, who settled after the war in the land he had helped defeat. He