The Premise: More than Content - A Feeling, A Place in Time & Space

“It is commonplace to view all of the United States as a monolith – one culture, one citizenry, one mass market. The homogenizing forces in American life – evidenced on every front from standardized television to eroded national accents, from national banking to the appalling sameness of Holiday Inns and McDonald stands – have brought us to thatpoint.

This (book/program) asserts a contrary them, that however real the nationalizing and leveling power of mass communications, of ectralize4d government and corporate power, each of the 50 states remains a unique blend of history and peoples and ecomony and politiocs and natural environment….To experience the world of Massachusetts or Texas, of Vermont or Arizona, of Florida or Oregon, is to live and move in strikingly different places…”

So read the introduction of The Book of America, Inside the Fifty States Today, by Neal R. Peirce & Jerry Hagstrom,W.W. Norton & Company, 1983. Though the words are now 25 years old, the thought is still compelling. If anything the standardiziation and homogeniziation over the decades has only accelerated. Media power has consolidated, Home Depot, Walmart and Barnes and Noble, Dunkin Donuts and Convenience Store Gasoline Stations are some of the nationalized brands – in addition to the Holiday Inns and McDonalds that endure.

Through it all there remains more to America than fast-food restaurants, shopping centers, strip mall and mega-stores. There’s a Hidden America of authentic Americana, often in the past scattered and hard to find, now available through Hidden America Radio (ON the Road On the Air).

Just what is the Hidden America?

It's not likely to be found on a map. Nonetheless, the Hidden America may be found across the land - in Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico, even New York City. It's the individual parts of America that collectively make up the American experience.

It's lobstermen in Maine, loggers at work in the woods of Washington State, a rodeo in Oklahoma, and Blue Ridge Mountain Bluegrass. It's the foods, places, peoples, customs, and history that unite Americans, while accounting for the historic diversity that endures to today.

Inspired by the late Charles Kurault’s On The Road. Hidden America is a guide to the people, places and events that celebrate America’s rich traditions in music, books, customs and history – information that for a long time was scattered and diffuse.