American Journey - On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs

In 1913, an unlikely friendship blossomed between Henry Ford and famed naturalist John Burroughs. When their mutual interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson led them to set out in one of Ford's Model Ts to explore the Transcendentalist's New England, the trip would prove to be the first of many excursions that would take Ford and Burroughs, together with an enthusiastic Thomas Edison, across America.

Their road trips-increasingly ambitious in scope-transported members of the group to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the Adirondacks of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont, finally paving the way for a grand 1918 expedition through southern Appalachia. In many ways, their timing could not have been worse. With war raging in Europe and an influenza pandemic that had already claimed thousands of lives abroad beginning to plague the United States, it was an inopportune moment for travel. Nevertheless, each of the men who embarked on the 1918 journey would subsequently point to it as the most memorable vacation of their lives.

These travels profoundly influenced the way Ford, Edison, and Burroughs viewed the world, nudging their work in new directions through a transformative decade in American history. In American Journey, Wes Davis re-creates these landmark adventures, through which one of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century helped the men who invented the modern age reconnect with the natural world-and reimagine the world they were creating.

About the author

Wes Davis is the author of American Journey and The Ariadne Objective, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He grew up in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and now lives outside New York City.

Summary

The epic road trips—and surprising friendship—of John Burroughs, nineteenth-century naturalist, and Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, inventors of the modern age

Product details

• Authors: Wes Davis, Davis Wes
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.08.2023
• EAN: 9781324000327
• ISBN: 978-1-324-00032-7
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 236 mm x 33 mm
• Weight: 602 g
• Illustrations: 25 photographs
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Business > General, dictionaries; USA, Biography: business & industry, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Business, 20th Century, HISTORY / World, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Science & Technology, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, General & world history, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, United States of America, USA, General and world history, History of the Americas, Biography: business and industry, Biography: science, technology & medicine, Biography: science, technology and medicine