The American people are various, and they have been all across the Ameri can landscape. Here they built a town, there they built a bridge, and in the next place they climbed a mountain-Jamestown, Concord Bridge, South Pass-and if they fought a battle on this spot, on the next one they endured less dramatic hardships and hammered the rough edges off an enduring dream. They founded villages which never came to much, and they also worked out a way of life which may embody the chief hope of a despairing world; and the names and places of all of this lie strewn all over the continent, from one shining ocean to the other. Trying to make a living, Americans made history, and the country is full of ghosts which come out of racial memories that go to the very heart of the best we have ever tried to be. Take it all in all, America is full of milestones on the road from yesterday to tomorrow.
This book is an attempt to set forth what some of those milestones are; to say what they look like today, how they got there, and what the men and women who put them there thought they were chiefly up to. There is nothing in all the world quite like this, because here history is still new.