Forging............................

      But America as a whole, once its early Puritan settlement had been diluted by those who followed or those already there, became too much of a mongrel nation to enjoy the simpler organic benefits of union.  Lacking the communal simplicities afforded in some other countries - Japan, say, or Norway - by the existence of one race, one ethnic group, or a single class or a dominant intellectual or spiritual tendency,  the great experiment that is America has had to make a union for itself, not wish it to grow in the dark out of time and nothing.  It has done so purposefully by the deliberate acts of its own people.  Man has had to do the hard work in bringing America together, forging something that in other, less complex places has been accomplished much more simply.

Simon Winchester,  The Men Who United The States:  America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation. Indivisible

Winchester, born in London, England chose to become a naturalized American citizen in 2011.  He is the author of more than a dozen books, most of which are highly interesting, instructive, and readable.