Measuring America : how the United States was shaped by the greatest land sale in history
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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.
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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"