BICENTENNIAL PROMOTION: This book will have high profile as it celebrates the Bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase in 2003. This bicentennial celebration parallels that of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial and will benefit from the promotion being done for that celebration. The authors are also throwing their complete support behind this book and making themselves available for tours and other promotion events. STUNNING VISUALS by Sam Abell reveal the river as an enduring Brown God, as T.S. Eliot put it. While the Ambrose/Brinkley text reveals the people and events of the river, Abell's photographs add a natural, timeless view of the river. In addition, each chapter is illustrated by a rich range of archival images and by National Geographic maps. With award-winning authors Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, cruise the Mississippi, lifeblood of America. The Ojibwe Indians called it Mezzisippi or Big River. In Algonquin it was Father of Waters. Poet T.S. Eliot, in St. Louis, deemed it a great brown God, and river pilot and author Mark Twain saw it as the body of the nation. With more than 150 lavish National Geographic photographs, period art, and artifacts, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation celebrates the Mississippi as a key acquisition in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and its publication will coincide with the Purchase's 2003 Bicentennial. Discover how the river and its banks have given us some of our greatest American icons: the Indian Mounds at Cahokia, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, keelboater Mike Fink, Black Hawk, Bluesman Robert Johnson, and Yogi Berra. Explore the antebellum South, Vicksburg, New Orleans' French Quarter. Listen to the Delta Blues. Discover how, in knowing the river, we know ourselves.