250 Great American Things: A Semi-Quincentennial Celebration (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798999146748)

In the spirit of our founding father, Mark Twain, County Highway is honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by gathering a raft of some of America's finest essayists, humorists, fiction writers, and other prose stylists and wise-asses to remind us of what makes America great. The answers, some deadpan, and others only mildly tongue-in-cheek, include lawn-mowers, gas grills, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, cowboy boots, catcher's mitts, light-bulbs, hairspray, chicken-wire fencing, and 242 other entries in what is sure to be the most amusing and least-tiresome tribute to a nation that occasionally commemorates the past by staging gaudy parades or engaging in bouts of solemn introspection but thrives most of the time on forgetting its history and making new stuff.

Given the bitter political divisions that render Americans capable of agreeing on anything of importance, we don't claim to list the "greatest" American things, nor do we rank them in any order besides the alphabetical. Rather, the greatness of each entry will speak for itself, and for the nation that we have built together -- by solving problems that needed solving, through flashes of off-kilter genius and intuition, and by kidding around.