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

 

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

by Simon Winchester

3.83 of 5 stars 3.83  ·  rating details  ·  103 ratings  ·  33 reviews

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Atlantic delivers his first book about America: a fascinating look at the men whose efforts and achievements helped unify the States and create one cohesive nation

"History is rarely as charming and entertaining as when it's told by Simon Winchester."-New York Times Book Review

For more than two centuries, E pluribus unum-Out of many, one-has been featured on America's official government seals and stamped on its currency. But how did America become "one nation, indivisible"? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? In this monumental history, Simon Winchester addresses these questions, bringing together the breathtaking achievements that helped forge and unify America and the pioneers who have toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizens and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings.

Winchester follows in the footsteps of America's most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators, including Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery Expedition to the Pacific Coast, 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; Truckee to Laramie; Seattle to Anchorage, introducing these fascinating men and others-some familiar, some forgotten, some hardly known-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.

Featuring 32 illustrations throughout the text, The Men Who United the States is a fresh, lively, and erudite look at the way in which the most powerful nation on earth came together, from one of our most entertaining, probing, and insightful observers.(less)

 ****

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zukd0JAAYuI

Simon Winchester, "The Men Who United the States..." | Talks at Google

Published on Nov 27, 2013

Moderated by Andrew Littell

Simon Winchester, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of "Atlantic" and "The Professor and the Madman", delivers his first book about America: "The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible," 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. Featuring 32 illustrations throughout the text, The Men Who United the States is a fresh look at the way in which the most powerful nation on earth came together.

 

Synonym, thesaurus

Who2 Biography:

Peter Mark Roget

, Physician / Philologist

• Born: 18 January 1779
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: 12 September 1869
• Best Known As: Creator of Roget's Thesaurus

Peter Mark Roget is the English physician who is now famous for his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. During his career he was a doctor in Manchester, a professor of physiology at the Royal Institution, and the secretary of the Royal Society. He retired in 1848 and devoted himself to his dictionary of synonyms, based on notes he'd been compiling since early in his career. In 1852 he published his thesaurus, now commonly called Roget's Thesaurus, which has been in print ever since.
Roget had wide interests and an inquisitive mind. His accomplishments include the invention of a slide rule he called a "log-log," used for calculating number roots and squares. He is also sometimes credited with a role in the history of cinema, thanks to a paper he presented in 1824 titled "Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel Seen Through Vertical Apertures." In it he reported his observations of an optical illusion he had witnessed as he saw moving carriage wheels through vertical blinds. Although he apparently didn't pursue this line of inquiry, others have credited him with first noting the phenomenon called "persistence of vision" -- in which still photographs seen in rapid succession give the illusion of movement -- which in turn led to the cinema.



書評
BOOKS A Yen for Synonyms
By Joshua Kendall

Is there another word for any word you know -- a more impressive, more apt or more elegant word that means the same thing? A thesaurus is built on the principle that there is indeed.

The first work in English that collected and organized synonyms (and antonyms) appeared in 1852: Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. The book was the work of Peter Mark Roget, a British polymath who is now the subject of Joshua Kendall's engaging "The Man Who Made Lists."

Roget, it turns out, was not mostly a lexicographer. He was a physician, research scientist, mathematician and chess whiz. He had finished a draft of his thesaurus in 1805, when he was 26, but put it aside for roughly 40 years. In the meantime he conducted scientific research, published scientific papers, including one on the effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas), and lectured to general audiences on scientific topics.

What propelled both his laboratory and lexicographical interests, Mr. Kendall tells us, was a passion for taxonomy and organizing things -- a passion, in short, for lists. . Eighteen years before his thesaurus appeared, he published a categorizing work called "Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered With Reference to Natural Theology."

How good was Roget's scientific work? Ralph Waldo Emerson extended his praise, but England's leading scientists, including Charles Darwin, were not impressed. Still, a paper of Roget's on optics, delivered to the Royal Society in 1820 -- "the retina typically sees a series of still images as a continuous picture" -- seems to have stimulated serious research and led eventually to the development of motion pictures.

But of course Roget's real legacy is his lexical reference work. Mr. Kendall compares Roget to Samuel Johnson: Both suffered from what we would now call obsessive-compulsive disorder, and both were, as Mr. Kendall puts it, "great dictionary men." But Johnson was also a great essayist, poet, literary critic and biographer. Roget had far more in common with Edward Casaubon, the pedantic husband of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's "Middlemarch." Casaubon had a mania for classification, too, spending years on his "Key to All Mythologies" and driving his wife to despair.

Roget's own life -- he died in 1869 at the age of 91 -- was marred by tragedy. His mother descended into madness. So did his sister. His uncle Samuel Romilly, a member of Parliament who fought for the abolition of slavery, committed suicide. Roget's wife died of cancer when she was 38. Roget himself fought off depression himself by ... making lists.

Mr. Kendall calls Roget's Thesaurus an "immortal book" and a "literary masterpiece." Immortal it may be, but is it a masterpiece? It does have a distinctive classifying system, organizing words into six categories of knowledge. But most readers ignore the categories and hunt for the synonyms. Which raises another question: Are they wise to do so?

Mr. Kendall says that consulting a thesaurus is likely to make writers "express themselves clearly and precisely." Simon Winchester, a British biographer, disagrees. Roget's Thesaurus, Mr. Winchester wrote in the Atlantic magazine several years ago, has "fostered poor writing" because it is not a discriminating guide to the use of words. "Roget," Mr. Winchester concluded, "never imagined...that an Ohio sophomore majoring in political science might one day use his book to find a word with which to pad out a paragraph in a midterm paper." It is better to consult a reference work, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, that gives examples of how a word is used in a sentence.

But let us not be too harsh. Roget's Thesaurus should probably be avoided by beginning writers, but seasoned ones may find that it jogs the mind when a dictionary is no help at all. Not surprisingly, Roget's work has a devoted readership among crossword-puzzle addicts. The first such puzzle appeared in December 1913 in the New York World. In 1925, Mr. Kendall tells us, the New York Times published an essay titled: "Roget Becomes Saint of Crosswordia." But checking out a word in Roget's can get a writer in trouble. In the most recent edition, the synonyms for saint include "pietist," "votary" and even "martyr."

Mr. Miller is the author of "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art."