One of the most climactic years in United States history seen through the eyes of an award-winning maker, and the culmination of many themes in van Agtmael's ongoing work on American power and ideology after 2001. Unfolding chronologically, the booklet brings a momentous year vividly to life.

Beginning on the first of January, a year like no other in memory unfolds through Covid-19 in New York City, lockdown rebellions, the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the rise of dangerous militias, Trump's populist base and election night at the White House, and closes with the storming of the Capitol and the swearing-in that followed a few weeks later. Diary entries accompany many of the pictures and can be read as a first draft of history: ominous, vulnerable, angry and sometimes surreal.