Summary of Simon Winchester's The Men Who United the States

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Jefferson had a lifelong fascination with trees. He thought of them as his favorite type of plants, and he went to great effort and expense to place those he liked best around Monticello.
#2 Monticello faced west, and if you looked straight across the estate, you could see all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But today, this is no longer the case. The trees have grown high, and someone sitting where the president liked to take his evening ease would not be able to see in the summer his blue remembered hills.
#3 Thomas Jefferson was a man with many contradictions, but his fascination with the American West was not one of them. He was obsessively interested in how the vast majority of America’s land could be apportioned among its growing population.
#4 The American settlers who lived beyond the Appalachians were initially cut off from the American mainstream, and there was talk of secession. But they were the first beneficiaries of one of Jefferson’s great ideas: the right to own land.

Sujets

• History
• United States
• Histoire
• 19th Century

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669398059
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Simon Winchester's The Men Who United the States
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Jefferson had a lifelong fascination with trees. He thought of them as his favorite type of plants, and he went to great effort and expense to place those he liked best around Monticello.

#2

Monticello faced west, and if you looked straight across the estate, you could see all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But today, this is no longer the case. The trees have grown high, and someone sitting where the president liked to take his evening ease would not be able to see in the summer his blue remembered hills.

#3

Thomas Jefferson was a man with many contradictions, but his fascination with the American West was not one of them. He was obsessively interested in how the vast majority of America’s land could be apportioned among its growing population.

#4

The American settlers who lived beyond the Appalachians were initially cut off from the American mainstream, and there was talk of secession. But they were the first beneficiaries of one of Jefferson’s great ideas: the right to own land.

#5

The Land Ordinance of 1785 was a piece of legislation that laid down the rules for how the American west was to be distributed. It established a place where the surveys of western America would be formally begun, and it raised money for a new government that was financially exhausted and depleted by the war with the British.

#6

The Geographer’s Line, which was the starting point for Thomas Jefferson’s survey of America, was 40 degrees 38 minutes North, 80 degrees 31 minutes West. It extended westward through the entire territory, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

#7

The survey system that Hutchins created was based on ranges, townships, sections, and subsections. It was intended that the distribution of the territory begin at a great speed. But the Indians felt that the white men’s treaties were unfair, and they feared being dispossessed.

#8

The Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, was bought from France in 1803. It needed to be surveyed and sold, and it needed to be crossed by settlers.

#9

The decision to send the Lewis and Clark expedition was made in 1802 at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, as he was familiar with his assistant’s practical abilities as a trapper and hunter.

#10

Lewis had a very sympathetic understanding of America’s aboriginal people. He had lived with the Cherokee in Georgia, the Chickasaw and the Shawnee in Mississippi, the Miami in Ohio, and the Potawatomi in Detroit.

#11

The expedition began in May 1804. The team assembled in Saint Charles, a village on the Missouri River’s north bank with a population of about four hundred. The river’s course was directed by the local geology: low Devonian sandstone hills on the river’s northern bank.

#12

Lewis and Clark spent the first six weeks traveling through what is now the state of Missouri. They found that they were making only minimal forward progress, even though their daily distances turned out to be quite long. It was more prudent and economical to follow the river than to fight it.

#13

The Lewis and Clark expedition reached a junction with a river they called the Kaw, today the Kansas River. The leaders were impressed with the landscape, but the army did not want to stay there. civilian settlers eventually built a camp there, and the city of Kansas City was built there later.

#14

I visited a polar opposite of a cattle farm in 1976, a Minuteman nuclear missile site. The Cold War is now over, but America still has deployed around the country three wings of Minuteman missiles, all nuclear tipped and more powerful than ever.

#15

The frontier mentality, if such a thing exists, still plays a role in American foreign policy today. The famous argument was made in 1895 by Frederick Jackson Turner, a University of Wisconsin history professor, that there was a significance in the simple existence of the frontier.

#16

The American mission to extend itself across the globe is a reflection of the strength and crudity of the pioneer Americans, who were brought up to date, made global, and now writ large for all the world to see.

#17

The irony of history is that America's present-day global reach, which is represented by weapons like this, was first conceived when two young soldiers were sent on a mission to extend the reach of their country, not across the world then, but from one ocean to another.

#18

The Praries were a different kind of prairie than what the explorers had seen before. They were vast, and the explorers were shocked by how treeless the country was.

#19

The Great Plains are a unique American geographical phenomenon. They are a tract of thinly settled grassland between half a million and a million and a half square miles, depending on the chosen boundaries. They are the result of a climate pattern that forces weather systems to rise as they pass over the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, then fall as rain or snow on the crags below.

#20

The Great Plains extend between the 95th and 105th meridians, and are dominated by short tufted grasses like fescue and needlegrass. In what is now Nebraska, the prairie is dominated by deep big bluestem, wild rye, and perennial tussock grasses like yellow Indiangrass.

#21

The image of tumbleweed, a ghostly botanical thing looking like a bouffant hairpiece, bouncing steadily across a dusty road, is iconic and frequently used by Hollywood. It is typically seen in black and white.

#22

The explorers passed the mouth of the sand-laden Platte River, which symbolized the border between the prairie and Great Plains. The explorers were now in a harsher, drier territory, where small cottonwood groves grew only in the deeper stream valleys.

#23

The expedition passed into the true short-grass prairie in October. The first snows came in October, and the Missouri began to freeze in November. The expedition was forced to set down its planned winter camp.

#24

The smallest commercial nuclear power station in America is in Nebraska, and it supplies power to the city of Omaha. It is officially the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Generating Station, and it stands more or less on the very point where Lewis and Clark had their first official meeting with a delegation of Indian chiefs.

#25

The explorers met the Otoe tribe, and gave one of Jefferson’s peace-and-amity cards to a quite naked Indian chief. He returned it and said he preferred to have more of the enticing goods the Corps had brought with them.

#26

The Sioux were a people of great number and power, and they were not to be trifled with. However, the white man did trifle with them from the very beginning by first calling them something they did not call themselves.

#27

The first meetings between the Yankton and Teton Sioux went well, but the encounters in retrospect were the starting points in a spiral of hostility between the ever-westward-moving whites and a people who turned out to be case-hardened and imperturbable.

#28

The expedition team met a French Canadian trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, who had worked for the North West Company for some years, and had lived with the Hidatsa most of that time. He was hired as an interpreter.

#29

Sacagawea was a Shoshone woman who was captured by a Hidatsa raiding party. She was helpful in recognizing parts of the Western landscape, and she was able to nudge the scouts to cross a particular mountain pass she knew.

#30

When the winter broke and the prairie ice began to melt, the party set off again. They sent their big iron boat downriver laden with reports, specimens, and booty for the White House. But most of the party set off upstream, towards the Pacific Ocean.

#31

The Lewis and Clark expedition traveled through the mountains and crossed the Great Falls of the Missouri, which they had to portage around. The landscape was dramatically different from anything they had seen since coming through the Appalachians.

#32

The Gates of the Mountains is a narrow rock-walled defile that Lewis named the Rockies’ leading edge. It is still called that, and for good reason. A curious optical illusion confronts anyone who boats upstream toward the towering line of cliffs that marks the leading edge of the range.

#33

The expedition leader, Meriwether Lewis, was overjoyed to have reached the mountains, but he heard a single shot ring out. He suddenly imagined a Blackfoot war party approaching them. It was a signal from Clark, who was over the mountains, too.

#34