They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators » (Reprint)

Harold Evans is currently working on two new books. America, Inc. will be a history of American business innovators from 1869 to the present. We the People is a prequel to The American Century, covering the period from the Revolution to 1889. Mr. Evans was most recently editorial director and vice chairman of the New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report. He lives in New York City with his wife, Tina Brown.

An illustrated history of American innovators--some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating--by the author of the bestselling The American Century.

The New Yorker

In his second large-format book about U.S. history, Evans extolls American moxie, that seemingly native mixture of initiative and luck that produced the Colt revolver, the FM radio, the Kodak camera, Mickey Mouse, and eBay. As a historian, Evans is less concerned with the inventive spark itself than with how it finds capital and markets. This approach allows fresh insights into familiar stories; we know that the Wright brothers flew, but not, perhaps, how they flirted with the French before selling their machine to the U.S. government. Evans favors “democratizers” who generated affordable mass culture; Henry Ford is his paragon. In the current era, he focusses on the ferment of Silicon Valley, as embodied by such innovators as Larry Page, the Google co-founder, who marvels that more people don’t work in technology, because “that’s the easiest way to change the world.”