The United States is covered in coordinates.
Some lead to places everybody knows. Others point to a dirt road, an abandoned town, an old bridge, a forgotten trail, a battlefield, a mountain, a factory, a neighborhood, a roadside oddity, or some tiny place most people have driven past a hundred times without ever wondering what happened there.
I wonder.
That is what The United States of Coordinates is about.
This collection explores America through its places and the stories connected to them. Roads, towns, landmarks, landscapes, transportation, industries, inventions, culture, disasters, triumphs, people, forgotten places, strange places, famous places, and ordinary places where something extraordinary happened.
Because coordinates do more than tell us where something is.
They can tell us where something happened.
Where somebody took a chance.
Where somebody failed.
Where somebody survived.
Where something was built, destroyed, discovered, invented, fought for, lost, changed, celebrated, mourned, or almost completely forgotten.
My first published book in this collection, The United States of Coordinates: The Paths Before Pavement, 1840 to 1900 Oregon Roads, begins with Oregon's early roads and the people, places, hardships, decisions, and history connected to them.
But that is one set of coordinates in a very big country.
There are more eras of Oregon roads to explore and an entire United States full of places whose stories deserve more than a paragraph in a textbook.
And I have absolutely no intention of giving them the sanitized textbook treatment.
These books are told in my signature Facts With Sass and Salted Reflections style.
I research the facts and dig into what actually happened, including the parts that are uncomfortable, devastating, inspiring, ridiculous, ingenious, heartbreaking, courageous, ugly, and beautifully human.
If there is bullshit hiding in the story, I am probably going to point at it.
If a myth has been repeated so many times that everybody assumes it is true, I want to know whether it actually is.
If somebody made a spectacularly questionable decision, we are going to talk about that too.
And yes, there will be sass.
A lot of sass.
But underneath all of it, I want to understand the why.
Why did people make the choices they made?
What were they facing at the time?
What principles were at stake?
Who paid the price?
Who benefited?
What did those choices set into motion?
That is where the Salted Reflection comes in.
Because knowing what happened is only the beginning.
I want to know what came from it.
What was lost and what was gained.
What changed because of it.
What people learned, or somehow managed not to learn.
What pieces of that history are still affecting us today.
And when there really was light at the end of the tunnel, I want to find that too. The resilience. The progress. The ingenuity. The people who rebuilt. The lessons that actually changed something. The good that sometimes managed to grow out of something incredibly hard.
I will never manufacture a happy ending where history did not give us one.
But I will look for the meaning in it.
Because America was not built out of neat little paragraphs, important dates, and people whose names were printed in bold.
It was built by human beings.
Complicated, stubborn, brilliant, flawed, courageous, desperate, creative, occasionally ridiculous human beings whose choices left marks all over this country.
And somewhere on a map, there is a coordinate for every damn one of those stories.
I want to find them.
This is The United States of Coordinates.
America, told one point at a time.
Written and created by Paxx