The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

by Simon Winchester,
The Boston Globe, November 4, 2013

Every day on Christie Street, in what was once the town of Raritan, N.J., a loudspeaker broadcasts the words of Thomas Alva Edison, taken from early gramophone recordings, Simon Winchester writes. On Edison’s birthday in February, the speakers are full of praise for the man who "invented today." Edison, of course, was one of many explorers and inventors who helped build the infrastructure that unified a large, heterogeneous nation. In "The Men Who United the States," Winchester, author of "The Professor and the Madman," "Krakatoa," and "The Man Who Loved China," who recently became a US citizen, provides an elegantly written account of the achievements of these men — and all are men — some of them little known or long forgotten.