Many nonmonotonic formalism, including default logic, logic programming with stable models, and autoepistemic logic, can be represented faithfully by means of modal nonmonotonic logics in the family proposed by McDermott and Doyle. In this paper properties of logics in this family are thoroughly investigated. We present several results on characterization of expansions. These results are applicable to a wide class of nonmonotonic modal logics. Using these characterization results, algorithms for computing expansions for finite theories are developed. Perhaps the most important finding of this paper is that the structure of the family of modal nonmonotonic logics is much simpler than that of the family of underlying modal (monotonic) logics. Namely, it is often the case that different monotonic modal logics collapse to the same nonmonotonic system. We exhibit four families of logics whose nonmonotonic variants coincide: 5-KD45, TW5-SW5, N-WK , and W5-D4WB . These nonmonotonic logics naturally represent logics related to commonsense reasoning and knowledge representation such as autoepistemic logic, reflexive autoepistemic logic, default logic, and truth maintenance with negation.