Measuring America : how the United States was shaped by the greatest land sale in history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Measuring America : how the United States was shaped by the greatest land sale in history
(A Plume book, . History)
Plume, 2003, c2002
- : pbk.
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
"First Plume Printing, October 2003"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-292) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In 1790, America was in enormous debt, having depleted what little money and supplies the country had during its victorious fight for independence. Before the nation's greatest asset, the land west of the Ohio River, could be sold it had to be measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic out of the morass of roughly 100,000 different units that were in use in daily life.Measuring America tells the fascinating story of how we ultimately gained the American Customary System-the last traditional system in the world-and how one man's surveying chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast.
Table of Contents
Measuring AmericaIntroduction
One: The Invention of Landed Property
Two: Precise Confusion
Three: Who Owned America?
Four: Life, Liberty, or What?
Five: Simple Arithmatic
Six: A Line Drawn in the Wilderness
Seven: The French Dimension
Eight: Democratic Decimals
Nine: The Birth of the Metric System
Ten: Dombey's Luck
Eleven: The End of Putnam
Twelve: The Immaculate Grid
Thirteen: The Shape of Cities
Fourteen: Hassler's Passion
Fifteen: The Dispossesed
Sixteen: The Limit of Enclosure
Seventeen: Four Against Ten
Eighteen: Metric Triumphant
Epilogue: The Witness Tree
Acknowledgments
Appendix: General Tables of Units of Measurement
Notes
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"