The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road

Memoirist and sports writer Dodson (The Range Bucket List) offers a charming look at the Great Wagon Road, the mid-18th-century route by which American colonists from the North settled the mountainous backcountries of the South. Inspired by the knowledge that his own ancestors traveled the Wagon Road to settle in the Carolinas, Dodson retraces the route from Philadelphia to Augusta, Ga. Along the way, he visits spots ranging from a colonial-style tavern in Philadelphia—where he eats a “period-correct supper”—to the Pennsylvania site of a 1763 massacre of dozens of unarmed Conestogas by the “Paxton Boys,” a settler mob that operated with the collusion of local authorities. Dodson notes a resonance between this period—the era of James Buchanan, whose chaotic administration led the nation “to the brink of civil war”—and today. He also moves through history as he travels, reflecting on America’s trajectory from the Revolution (he visits a North Carolina battlefield where the British faced off against the backcountry’s “Overmountain Men”) to the Civil War (the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens was born into a Wagon Road family) and the civil rights movement (he recalls his father bringing him, on his seventh birthday, to witness the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in). With its many perceptive reflections on the movements of history, this edifies. (July)