Front and centre of these future visions, iconic American topography and its culture – the cosy homesteads, hypnotic crop plains, travelling fairs – almost feel as if they exist out of time.
Today, Chinese journalists, tourists and the just plain curious travel to border cities near North Korea to ponder what it was like in China only some 50 years ago.
Declining a third term because, Washington wrote to a friend in Virginia, he was treated in the press like "a pickpocket, a common defaulter," the old general briefly turned up for Adams' inauguration already wearing his plain black travel suit and whispered, "Ay, I am safely out and you are safely in; we'll see which of us is the happier".
It's something about the sense of space and scale, the empties plains and travel by means of horseback creating a more captivating spectacle than Liberty City provided.
The Jouberts' campaign, Rhinos Without Borders – now operated by their Great Plains Conservation travel business and the safari company Andbeyond – is the largest and most expensive rhino relocation to date.
In "Bad Land," a book about the settling and the abandonment of the Great Plains, the travel writer Jonathan Raban describes a lightning storm moving in from the west: "One could see it coming for an hour before it hit: the distant artillery flashes on a sky of deep episcopal purple".
His books include "Dating Your Mom," "Lamentations of the Father," "Great Plains," and "Travels in Siberia".
Gaus takes an evenhanded approach to the conflicting values of the otherworldly Plain People, who travel by horse and buggy and shun electricity on their farms, as well as intruders from "the modern world of gadgets".
While some of the examples included were a bit of reach (e.g. sleep, movies, golf) or just plain unobtainable (space travel), there were enough promising entries in the tome to keep me busy for a few days while on my quest to aid the sober.
She added: "It is plain that having travelled from your native Sudan, you were in a state of desperation when you decided to walk through the Channel tunnel".
