The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America

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Simon Winchester. The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America

Copyright

Praise. From the reviews of The Men Who United the States:

Dedication

Epigraph

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. Illustrations noted as “(pd.)” are in the public domain

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PREFACE: THE PURE PHYSICS of UNION

A VIEW ACROSS THE RIDGE

DRAWING A LINE IN THE SAND

PEERING THROUGH THE TREES

THE FRONTIER AND THE THESIS

THE WOOD WAS BECOME GRASS

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SIOUX

FIRST LADY OF THE PLAINS

HIGH PLAINS RAFTERS

PASSING THE GATEWAY

SHORELINE PASSAGE

THE LASTING BENEFIT OF HARMONY

THE SCIENCE THAT CHANGED AMERICA

DRAWING THE COLORS OF ROCKS

THE WELLSPRING OF KNOWLEDGE

THE TAPESTRY OF UNDERNEATH

SETTING THE LURES

OFF TO SEE THE ELEPHANT

THE WEST, REVEALED

THE SINGULAR FIRST ADVENTURE OF KAPURATS

THE MEN WHO GAVE US YELLOWSTONE

DIAMONDS, SEX, AND RACE

JOURNEYS TO THE FALL LINE

THE STREAMS BEYOND THE HILLS

THE PIVOT AND THE FEATHER

THE FIRST BIG DIG

THE WEDDED WATERS OF NEW YORK

THE LINKMAN COMETH

THAT OL’ MAN RIVER

MAY THE ROADS RISE UP

RAIN, STEAM, AND SPEED

THE ANNIHILATION OF THE IN-BETWEEN

THE IMMORTAL LEGACY OF CRAZY JUDAH

MAJOR EISENHOWER’S EPIPHANIC EXPEDITION

THE COLOSSUS OF ROADS

AND THEN WE LOOKED UP

THE TWELVE-WEEK CROSSING

TO GO, BUT NOT TO MOVE

THE MAN WHO TAMED THE LIGHTNING

THE SIGNAL POWER OF HUMAN SPEECH

WITH POWER FOR ONE AND ALL

LIGHTING THE CORN, POWERING THE PRAIRIE

THE TALK OF THE NATION

MAKING MONEY FROM AIR

TELEVISION: THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

THE ALL OF SOME KNOWLEDGE

EPILOGUE

Footnotes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SEARCHABLE TERMS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY SIMON WINCHESTER

About the Publisher

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‘Simon Winchester is one of the quintessentially English writers who will go anywhere, literally and figuratively … because of his amateur status, boldness and decidedly nonacademic approach to history, [he] achieves something remarkable here’

Literary Review

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On the 100th meridian itself, in the midplains, there is more of a mix. In what is now Nebraska, say, with its wide, empty farm fields, Willa Cather’s famous “shaggy coat of the prairie” has a pile six feet high at least, made of deep big bluestem, Panicum witchgrass, wild rye, perennial tussock grasses like yellow Indiangrass, and a weave of flowering timothy and blue grama. (The last is a prairie grass that currently displays its own limitations, for it manages at once to be sufficiently abundant to be the official state grass of Colorado and yet is classified as endangered only five hundred miles east in Illinois, whose western counties, if not quite the Great Plains, are very much a part of the tallgrass prairie.)

Lewis and Clark saw all of these grasses—even timothy, the only non-native of the group, which had been introduced from Europe more than a century before and had spread across the nation with astonishing speed. But one plant they would not have seen, despite its now being a near-legendary symbol of the plains—was tumbleweed.

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