The venerated US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once declared that the country's 50 states should best be understood as "laboratories" for the laws and customs, the mores and procedures, that will ultimately spread across the land and shape the body politic.
The United States is many things, but more than anything else, it is an idea. As Brandeis noted, these ideas shift and evolve. Sometimes they disappear, while other times they develop into grand nation-building schemes. For the past 200 years, this model has kept the US moving steadily forward, shaping the future and, as Empire discovers, it is a process that continues.
With the country still reeling from years of economic recession, a crippled housing market, record levels of unemployment and a bitterly divided - some might say broken - political process, it is to individual states that people are turning.
But do the states have the answers Americans want? To answer these questions, and examine how this process works, we take an in-depth look at three of the most powerful, dynamic and politically relevant states in the union: New York, California and Texas. Each, in its own unique way, offering a vision for the rest of the country to follow.
