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Book: The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
Quotes of Book: The Men Who United the States:
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  1. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    Another party, who took an iron boat named the Explorer into the Black Canyon of the lower Colorado River, came across an Indian of what they considered such staggering ugliness that one of their number, a German visitor attached to the party, voted to kill him, pickle him in alcohol as a zoological specimen, and take him back to New York for forensic inspection. The proposal was rejected, however, and the hapless man lived.
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  2. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which-together with two Canadian provinces-contribute waters to its flow.
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  3. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean had been written by a Scottish fur trader, from Stornoway in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, named Alexander Mackenzie. Or more accurately, Sir Alexander Mackenzie-since King George III had awarded him a knighthood for becoming the first white man ever to cross the entirety of North America. Mackenzie had completed his voyage almost nine years earlier. He suspected that his seven-month overland journey to the Pacific was probably of historic moment, and so he had left a memorial. He had created what he hoped would be a lasting inscription on a tiny sea-washed rock near the present-day British Columbia fishing village of Bella Coola: "Alex. MacKenzie, from Canada by land. 22nd July, 1793." He had inscribed the message with his finger, using an old trappers' trick for long-duration messages, dipping it into a poultice made of bear grease mixed with vermilion powder and smearing out words that he hoped would survive the cold and lashing rains for which the Pacific coast is notorious.
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  4. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of the country's cruelest climates {with roof-topping lake-effect snowfalls drowning the city each winter} to live in and around Buffalo is testimony to the wisdom of Judge Wilkeson and the city fathers of 1825 in doing all the persuading, as well as dredging and prettifying the banks of Buffalo Creek.
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  5. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today-Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia-even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten.
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  6. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    the creation of any sense of unity among a population of potentially disharmonious settlers almost always requires the deliberate agency of man.
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  7. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    2 percent of America's electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.
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  8. Simon Winchester _ The Men Who United the States:

    Railroads brought about lasting social effects, as well. The companies' ruthless attention to keeping time impelled passengers to carry pocket watches,* and led to the eventual establishment of time zones.
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