
The Oregon Trail
1849 · 951 pages
Twenty-three and fresh from Harvard, Parkman rode onto the 1846 prairie and spent three weeks hunting buffalo with an Oglala Sioux band. He got the West down before the railroads reached it.
★ 5.4

Twenty-three and fresh from Harvard, Parkman rode onto the 1846 prairie and spent three weeks hunting buffalo with an Oglala Sioux band. He got the West down before the railroads reached it.

Morse tapped the title into the first telegraph line in 1844. Howe's Pulitzer-winning account of antebellum America argues that communications, markets, and revival religion remade the country while Jacksonian politics took the credit.