"The Sir Walter Disease"

"Sir Walter Scott, more than any other writer, shaped Americans’ conception of manliness, bravery and combat in the period leading up to the Civil War. And his influence did not end once the fighting began.
"If the lived reality of four years of suffering and slaughter did not neatly conform to Scott’s knightly norms, the war as presented in romantic Southern poetry very often did."

Cynthia Wachtell in The New York Times describes the influence of Sir Walter Scott in nineteenth-century America.

Full Steam Ahead

"The creation of the age of steam meant many things to America. At the end of the century, historian Henry Adams, in assessing Fulton's feat that day, marked it 'as the beginning of a new era in America--a date which separated the colonial from the independent stage of growth,' for the U.S. was alone in possessing such a vessel and would be for decades. He added that 'the problem of steam navigation, so far as it applied to rivers and harbors, was settled, and for the first time America could consider herself mistress of her vast resources.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Kirkpatrick Sale marks the two hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton's steamship trip up the Hudson River.