Introduction

41 years ago a 21-year old graduate student, who had only arrived in America the day before, boarded a Greyhound bus at Penn Station in New York. Over the next 11 days, he travelled across the country, stopping briefly only in Chicago and Salt Lake City, to San Francisco, and then back again to Columbus Ohio.

41 years later I definitely do not have the energy to take such a trip. But I have always wanted to repeat it, at my leisure, to see the country that I have spent my career studying.

In many ways my career has focussed on answering a question first asked by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer. What then is the American, this new man…?

In my travels in the summer of 2025 I hope to ponder on this question, and to consider how the country has changed over 41 years.

Read about my travels in my blog as I muse on America and history.