For just a few dollars registration, you got temporary possession of a good piece of land. Live on it for five years, build a house, and farm it, and it was yours. What a brilliant economic stimulus!

I find her [Frances Trollope] simply delightful, even in her prejudices and cantankerousness. It is a gift to an author to find a funny, wry, perceptive contemporary observer to whom the subject matter seems almost as different and alien, and requiring as much struggling to understand, as it did to me.

We demonstrated what you could do when a band of entrepreneurs settles an empty country with vast resources. The Chinese have a billion people and are running out of water. Tougher problem for sure.

No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.

I've been in China enough to know that you shouldn't opine on it unless you speak Chinese and have lived there for twenty years. I wasn't pretending to be a China expert in that final chapter. I was just pointing, first to the parallels between Chinese behavior toward us and ours toward GB when we were at the same stage of development, and secondly to how much harder their development path is than ours was.

The War of 1812 perhaps the least remembered of American wars because it was fought in such a left-handed slapdash manner on both sides.

The Transcontinental Railroad Act is the first step in creating a continental common market.