America’s First Great Eclipse tells the story of a country, and its scientists, on the brink of a new era. Near the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States was barely a hundred years old, American astronomers took the lead in a science that Europeans had dominated for centuries.

On July 29, 1878, America's astronomers spread out across the Great Plains and climbed to the top of 14,000-foot Pikes Peak, all to glimpse one of nature’s grandest spectacles: a total solar eclipse.

The Rocky Mountain eclipse of 1878 was not only a turning point in American science, but was also the beginning of high-altitude astronomy, without which our current understanding of the Universe would be impossible.