The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EIQ3018 | Format: PDF
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible Description
Simon Winchester, the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, delivers his first book about America: a fascinating popular history that illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings.
How did America become ?one nation, indivisible?? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? To answer these questions, Winchester follows in the footsteps of America?s most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators, such as Lewis and Clark and the leaders of the Great Surveys; the builders of the first transcontinental telegraph and the powerful civil engineer behind the Interstate Highway System. He treks vast swaths of territory, from Pittsburgh to Portland, Rochester to San Francisco, Seattle to Anchorage, introducing the fascinating people who played a pivotal role in creating today?s United States.
Throughout, he ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree. The Men Who United the States is a fresh look at the way in which the most powerful nation on Earth came together.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 13 hours and 33 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Audible.com Release Date: October 15, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EIQ3018
The story of the United States was once told as the history of its explorers, pioneers, and inventors, men like Benjamin Franklin, Lewis and Clark, and Thomas Alva Edison. These were experimenters, risk takers, and adventurers who weren't content to follow an easy path through life, and instead defined a new country that was different from the one they or their ancestors came from, and a new century. Sadly, that way of viewing history has fallen out of favor, at least in academic circles, in favor of a new collective myth, in which masses of immigrants brought all of their culture with them and created not so much a new kind of state as they did a buffet of old world cultures.
Perhaps that's why it fell to an immigrant to re-tell the story of America as it was once told. Simon Winchester, the author of a number of excellent popular histories, is an Englishman who, contrary to most of his contemporaries in the UK, still sees the US as the embodiment of progress, and actually became a US citizen. His history of the US begins with Thomas Jefferson, and the birth of the Corps of Discovery, that great and ambitious project that resuled in the voyage of Lewis and Clarke to the Pacific coast and back, returning with a description of the lands to the West. It ends with the story of J.C.R. Licklider, a man whose role in the creation of the Internet and interactive computing has only begin to be recognized outside of a narrow group of computer pioneers (see The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal).
Simon Winchester's tome is an ambitious attempt to connect individuals and technologies with the physical and emotional unification of the United States using the five so-called classical elements of Eastern philosophy: wood, earth, water, fire, and metal. This ambitious project falls short, but not for want of trying.
The book begins (Part I: When America's Story was Dominated by Wood, 1793-1805) with an unfortunate choice: the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This section is superficial and unfocused, with significant errors in important details. Interested in Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery? Read Stephen E. Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West" for a more in-depth and coherent account.
A much better choice than Lewis and Clark is suggested in Winchester's own epilog about the role of a new newspaper in the unification of his small town. A discussion of the role of print (on paper made from wood pulp) in the form of newspapers, books, essays, and magazines would have met the requirements of his classical element. It would also have made the section jibe with the rest of the book in which technology plays a significant role in his theme of unification. Consider Paul Revere's propaganda engraving, "The Bloody Massacre in King-Street," March 5, 1770 advertised in newspapers across the colonies, and the availability of inexpensive paperbacks read by soldiers in World War II as ways that print technology has unified Americans.
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