Today, we live like no one before us has ever lived. Most of us in the United States have far better living conditions, much more free time, options in how to spend that free time, and resources to spend as we chose among those options, than ever before in human history. We have far more options in travel, communications, entertainment, education, careers, what to wear, what to eat, where and how to live, and in health care, than even the wealthiest elites and rulers in earlier generations. But how did we get from clans of subsistence farmers and hunter/gatherer nomads to modern life?
The United States was born on July 4, 1776. In less than 200 years, it went from being a tiny new nation scattered along the Atlantic coast without a single bank anywhere in the country to the most powerful nation on earth, militarily, technologically, culturally, economically, and politically. And it has also become the most ethnically diverse nation the world has ever known. How did all that happen?
The answers to these two questions are inextricably linked into a single story. A story of human progress: of common people doing uncommon things, both noble and ignoble. A story that, while the facts are well known to experts, is rarely told and little understood. This story deals with how people lived and agents of change: the cause and effect of those people, events, ideas, materials, products, and forces, often unrecognized, that have played an outsized role, for better or worse, in reshaping the world into what it is today. Then, what sustains our world as we look to a future yet to be written?
