The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved,
Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz.
With Spying on the South, 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 were revelatory
for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the
American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by
creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central
Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape
architect.
Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the 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 (including muleback): through Appalachia,
down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to
the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths,
Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the
Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through
an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of
Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates
in the Attic.
