250 Great American Things

In the spirit of our founding father, Mark Twain, County Highway is honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by gathering a raft of some of America’s finest essayists, humorists, fiction writers, and other prose stylists and wise-asses to remind us of what makes America great. The answers, some deadpan, and others only mildly tongue-in-cheek, include lawn-mowers, gas grills, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, cowboy boots, catcher’s mitts, light-bulbs, hairspray, chicken-wire fencing, and 242 other entries in what is sure to be the most amusing and least-tiresome tribute to a nation that occasionally commemorates the past by staging gaudy parades or engaging in bouts of solemn introspection but thrives most of the time on forgetting its history and making new stuff. 

Given the bitter political divisions that render Americans capable of agreeing on anything of importance, we don’t claim to list the “greatest” American things, nor do we rank them in any order besides the alphabetical. Rather, the greatness of each entry will speak for itself, and for the nation that we have built together — by solving problems that needed solving, through flashes of off-kilter genius and intuition, and by kidding around.

CONTRIBUTORS: 

Tony Badran, Ryan Baesemann, Drew Bratcher, Kaitlan Bui, Cyrus Coron, J.D. Daniels, John Demeny, Johnny Dwyer, Lucy Ellis, Anne Fadiman, Matthew Fishbane, Gary Fisketjon, Clementine James Ford, Amanda Fortini, Clayton Sheldon Fox, Ian Frazier, Chandler Fritz, Meaghan Garvey, David Gates, Lazo Gitchos, Wade Graham, Aaron Gwyn, Emily Hamilton, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Tama Janowitz, Lee Clay Johnson, Jacob Kaplan, Josh Kaufman, Walter Kirn, Maisie Kirn, Valen Lambert, Liel Leibovitz, Kurt Loder, Kevin Lozano, David Mikics, Farahn Morgan, Jefferson Morley, Bruce Murkoff, Alana Newhouse, Krist Novoselic, Gus O’Connor, Alex Perez, Jonah Raskin, Noah Rawlings, Armin Rosen, Donald Rosenfeld, David Samuels, Susannah Samuels, Jim Shepard, Bud Smith, Charlie Smith, Ho-Ming So, J.J. Solari, Gerry Stanek, Sandy Sternshein, Daniel Talamantes, Michele Thomas, Peter Trachtenberg, Jeff Weiss, and Sasha Wiseman.