More often than not, we think of a country's history as a narrative, a sequential tale of great people and important events. But sometimes it's more revealing to think of history as a map of the eras, inventions, ideas, and people that have shaped our country for more than five hundred years, from the first visitors to North America's shores to the first years of the 21st century. Combining the unparalleled cartography and the extraordinary graphic archive of the National Geographic Society, this marvelous volume charts an engrossing web of connections, vividly displayed in a series of concise, self-contained essays and scores of maps that are the heart of a stunning visual chronicle that unfolds our history in a new and fascinating way. Each chapter is introduced by a time line that sets its subjects in context, then dozens of photographs, period maps, and illustrations capture the flavor of life in eras and places as varied as Texas cow towns and Tennessee coal mines, colonial Boston and gold-rush California. Subject maps trace the great rivers and rough trails settlers followed as they fanned out across an unexplored continent, with a lively text that explains who they were and why they headed West, and are accompanied by a sidebar in which Mark Twain reminisces about life as a Mississippi steamboat pilot. We learn how an 1859 gusher at Titusville, Pennsylvania, led to a nationwide search for "black gold," and how John D. Rockefeller channeled it into Standard Oil. We learn how Eli Whitney's cotton gin, Henry Ford's Model T, and dozens of other inventions transformed our landscape; and we watch as social movements--labor unions, women's suffrage, civil rights--Sstruggle to include the disenfranchised in the American Dream. In these pages we find political battles and military campaigns, immigrants and industrialists, ordinary people and Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush. Wide-ranging, entertaining, and as expansive as America itself, the Historical Atlas of the United States is an important reference and an indispensable guide to the many intertwined paths that have led to the nation we know.