In Country of Exiles, William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility. He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our national identity.Leach takes us across a featureless America, where strip malls homogenize a once varied and majestic landscape, and where casinos displace the Native American spiritual connection to the land. He shows us a culture where everyone, from CEOs to office temps, abandons the notion of company loyalty, and where rootless academics posit a world without borders. With compelling vision and insight, Leach reveals the profound but often hidden impact of America's disintegrating sense of place on our national and individual psyche.From the Trade Paperback edition.

From one of our most highly regarded historians, an original and engrossing chronicle of  nineteenth-century America's infatuation with butterflies and the naturalists  who described and named countless new species  and unveiled the mysteries of their existence.A product of William Leach's life-long love of butterflies and in-depth original research into nineteenth-century correspondence and scientific writings, this engaging, elegantly illustrated history shows how Americans from all walks of life passionately pursued butterflies and through their discoveries and observations transformed the character of natural history. Leach focuses on a half dozen of the pioneer lepidopterists who traveled across the country and then the world, collecting and studying unknown and exotic species. Among the most brilliant were William Henry Edwards, radical Darwinian and great grandson of the theologian Jonathan Edwards, and brave Will Doherty of Cincinnati who...

This monumental work of cultural history was nominated for a National Book Award. It chronicles America's transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition. 24 pages of photos.From the Trade Paperback edition.