Most vistas on the Cumberland Plateau display a flat horizon

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    The American experience can be presented in terms of enlightenment philosophy, post-Reformation Christianity, scientific competence, technological skill, commercial drive, and military might, all let loose on what might be the richest, most benign, surely one of the most beautiful and unspoiled, continents. After some four centuries of the American experience, we have before us a still beautiful and abundant land, but a land of roads and automobiles and grimy cities, a land extensively plundered of its forests and mineral resources, a land with its human inhabitants somewhat bewildered and rebellious against their role as the great consumer people of earth.