Authors: Bill Bryson
ISBN-13: 9780380713813, ISBN-10: 0380713810
Format: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: March 1996
Edition: Reprint
With a wacky worldview -- and wanderlust -- that garners him comparisons to everyone from Chaucer to Dave Barry, Bill Bryson entertains readers around the world with his travelogues and riffs on the intricacies of language.
Bill Bryson, who gave glorious voice to The Mother Tongue, now celebrates her magnificent offspring in the book that reveals once and for all how a dusty western hamlet with neither woods nor holly came to be known as Hollywood...and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle call his befeathered cap "Macaroni."
Plain fun ... a terrific book, likely to make its readerschuckle if not guffaw ... Bryson manages to demolish somecherished American myths ... If more high schools used thisas their history text, the course might be one of the morepopular ones in school.
Introduction | ||
1 | The Mayflower and Before | 1 |
2 | Becoming Americans | 13 |
3 | A "Democratical Phrenzy": America in the Age of Revolution | 30 |
4 | Making a Nation | 48 |
5 | By the Dawn's Early Light: Forging a National Identity | 64 |
6 | We're in the Money: The Age of Invention | 82 |
7 | Names | 100 |
8 | "Manifest Destiny": Taming the West | 119 |
9 | The Melting Pot: Immigration in America | 134 |
10 | When the Going Was Good: Travel in America | 156 |
11 | What's Cooking?: Eating in America | 180 |
12 | Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America | 206 |
13 | Manners and Other Matters | 219 |
14 | The Hard Sell: Advertising in America | 235 |
15 | The Movies | 248 |
16 | The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play | 263 |
17 | Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War | 287 |
18 | Sex and Other Distractions | 304 |
19 | From Kitty Hawk to the Jumbo Jet | 324 |
20 | Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond | 334 |
21 | American English Today | 352 |
Notes on Sources | 365 | |
Select Bibliography | 385 | |
Index | 395 |