"The best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times. For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name 'Yeoman, ' the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners--white and black, free and enslaved, rich and poor--were revelatory for readers of his day, and have endured as classic text for the study of America on the brink of cataclysmic breakup. Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape. As a rebuke to the caste-bound ideology of the South's master class, Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's path-breaking career as America's foremost landscape architect. Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amid the angry discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport: through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing, as Olmsted did, far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges of the Cotton Kingdom and strange new mutations that have sprung from its roots. [This book] is also a penetrating and poignant study of Olmsted, whose destiny was forged by his Southern odyssey. Horwitz's wise, intrepid, and often hilarious tale of his journey through an outsize American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic."--Jacket.

American nomad -- Yeoman Olmsted: "An enthusiast by nature" -- Over the Alleghenies: gateway to the Rust Belt -- Ohio River: mutants making tow -- Kentucky: "A balance sheet of good against evil" -- To Tennessee and back: a thorough aristocrat -- Mississippi River: Steamboat blues -- Lower Mississippi: the absolute South -- New Orleans: the gumbo city -- Into the bayou: "Dat's how we roll" -- Central Louisiana: the unreconstructed South -- The Red River; heard of mudness -- Across the Sabine: "Gwine to Texas" -- Gulf Coast: oil and water -- Crockett, Texas: "The drift of things" in ruby-red America -- Austin and beyond: the Loon Star Republic -- San Antonio: high holy days at the Alamo -- German Texas: Olmsted in Arcadia -- The Hill Country: true to the Union -- Upper Guadalupe: and Absalom rode upon a mule -- To the Rio Grande: border disorder -- La Frontera: days of the dead -- Central Park ramble.