In this entertaining cultural history, Moss explores the circumstances that led to the establishment of the country club as an American social institution and its inextricable connection to the ancient, imported game of golf. Moss traces the evolution of country clubs from informal groups
of golf-playing friends to country estates in the suburbs and eventually into public and private daily-fee courses, corporate country clubs, and gated golfing communities. The book shows how these developments reflect shifts in American values and attitudes toward health and sport, as well as changing...

Jedidiah Morse - clergyman, geographer, and father of the painter and inventor Samuel Morse - was a significant figure in post-Revolutionary New England. Through his popular geography texts, he described the new nation to Americans. As a prominent Congregationalist minister, he involved himself deeply in the heated religious controversies of his day. As a polemicist, he voiced the anxieties Americans felt about such turbulent events as the French Revolution and the political and religious changes their own country was undergoing. As Richard Moss reveals in this compelling biography, Morse was...