They made America

Published in 2004, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine was written by Harold Evans, the former editor of The Sunday Times and a noted chronicler of industrial history. The book serves as a comprehensive exploration of the innovators and entrepreneurs who shaped the United States, positioning the American spirit of invention as the primary engine behind the nation's emergence as a global power. Evans organized the narratives chronologically, focusing on how these individual breakthroughs—spanning from the telegraph to the internet—collectively built the modern American landscape.

The book is notable for its extensive use of archival photography and design elements curated to contextualize each technological leap. Evans sought to move beyond dry biography by emphasizing the narrative arc of progress and the often turbulent personal lives of the inventors featured. Upon its release, the work was widely received as a definitive popular history of innovation, praised for its accessible prose and its success in synthesizing a vast range of industrial history into a cohesive, readable volume.