Made In America - Bill Bryson [0]
Bill Bryson
Illustrations by Bruce McCall
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
About The Author
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Mayflower and Before
2 Becoming Americans
3 A ‘Democratic Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
4 Making a Nation
5 By the Dawn’s Early Light: Forging a National Identity
6 We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
7 Names
8 ‘Manifest Destiny’: Taming the West
9 The Melting-Pot: Immigration in America
10 When the Going was Good: Travel in America
11 What’s Cooking?: Eating in America
12 Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America
13 Domestic Matters
14 The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
15 The Movies
16 The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play
17 Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
18 Sex and Other Distractions
19 The Road from Kitty Hawk
20 Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond
21 American English Today
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Also by Bill Bryson
Excerpt
Footnotes
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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MADE IN AMERICA
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552998055
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
Minerva edition published 1995
Black Swan edition published 1998
Copyright © Bill Bryson 1994
Illustrations copyright © by Bruce McCall
Bill Bryson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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About the Author
Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers alive. For the past two decades he has been entertaining readers with bravura displays of wit and wisdom. His first book, The Lost Continent, in which he put small town America under the microscope, was an instant classic of modern travel literature. Although he has returned to America many times since, never has he been more funny, more memorable, more acute than in his most recent book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, in which he revisits that most fecund of topics, his childhood. The trials and tribulations of growing up in 1950s America are all here. Des Moines, Iowa, is recreated as a backdrop to a golden age where everything was good for you, including DDT, cigarettes and nuclear fallout. This is as much a story about an almost forgotten, innocent America as it is about Bryson’s childhood. The past is a foreign country. They did things differently then ...
Bill Bryson