In 1953, Jan Morris spent a year travelling across the United States, recording her impressions in her very first book. She was then James Morris and the US was a nation unrecognizable to us today. She found an America 'bursting with bright optimism, generous, unpretentious, proud of its recent victories, basking in its universal popularity'. Globalization was still far off, television was in its infancy, the Big Mac had not been invented and the popular song of the day was 'Chattanooga Choo Choo'. --