Free Downloads Measuring America: How An Untamed Wilderness Shaped The United States And Fulfilled The Promise Of Democracy
Measuring America is the fascinating, provocative, and eye-opening story of why America has ended up with its unique system of weights and measures―the American Customary System, unlike any other in the world―and how this has profoundly shaped our country and culture. In the process, Measuring America reveals the colossal power contained inside the acres and miles, ounces and pounds, that we use every day without ever realizing their significance.The most urgent problem facing the newly independent United States was how to pay for the war that won the country its freedom; America's debt was enormous. Its greatest asset was the land west of the Ohio River, but for this huge territory to be sold, it had first to be surveyed―that is, measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic. English, Scottish, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and other settlers had all brought their own systems with them (more than 100,000 different units are reckoned to have been in daily use), and in his first address to Congress, George Washington put the establishment of a single system of weights and measures immediately after a national defense and a currency as the United States' most urgent priority.The debate on this vital measure took place at a critical moment in the history of ideas, when the traditional, subjective view of the world was being increasingly challenged by objective, scientific reasoning. Thomas Jefferson―supported by Washington, Adams, Madison, Monroe, even Hamilton―championed the new idea of a scientific 10-based system derived from some universal constant such as time or the size of the earth. Such an alliance should have ensured a decimal America, but ranged against them was the invisible genius of Edmund Gunter, the seventeenth-century English mathematician whose twenty-two-yard surveying chain, introduced in 1607, had revolutionized land ownership in Britain and was still used by every surveyor in America―including Thomas Hutchins and his successors in charge of the land survey on the Ohio frontier.How we ultimately gained the American Customary System―the last traditional system in the world―and how Gunter's chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast is both an exciting human and intellectual drama and one of the great untold stories in American history. At a time when the metric system may finally be unstoppable, Andro Linklater has captured the essential nature of measurement just as the Founding Fathers understood it. Sagely argued and beautifully written, Measuring America offers readers nothing less than the opportunity to see America's history―and our democracy―in a brilliant new light.
Hardcover: 310 pages
Publisher: Walker Books; First Edition edition (November 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0802713963
ISBN-13: 978-0802713964
Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #919,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #85 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Civil & Environmental > Surveying & Photogrammetry #348 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Demography #892 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Reference > History
Andro Linklater is a Scottish journalist who fell in love with America when he was flying over it, looking out the window at "the spectacular grid of city blocks, the squared-off American Gothic farms, and the long, straight section roads that caught the imagination of Kerouac." Now he has written a fascinating book to tell us just how we got so square. _Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy_ (Walker) shows that geometry and land acquisition and speculation drove the development of the nation.The importance of simply measuring the land has reinforced for Americans the value of land ownership. Native Americans did not enclose or measure land, and thus they could not convincingly demonstrate (to those who wanted to take it from them) that they owned it. This pattern was true not just in America, but in, for example, South Africa and Australia. Patterns of demarcation even influenced regional character. In the South, the legislatures were dominated by landowners who relied upon local surveyors who did not use chains and theodolites, but instead relied on marked trees and memory. Such a system caused violent struggles, but it also meant that doubts over actual ownership inhibited speculation and transfer of land. In the North, farmers would settle, improve the land, sell, and move to another measured plat; in the south, owners kept the property for generations, and Linklater refers to the effect on southern literature of such patterns of survey and ownership as being good material for future scholarly research. The squares laid out in the 19th century did not help efficient farming, but they helped the financier, who could easily track the value of the squares; settlement was based on speculation.
Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy Ecuador and the United States: Useful Strangers (United States and the Americas) (United States and the Americas) (The United States and the Americas) Scott 1998 Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps: Confederate States, Canal Zone, Danish West Indies Guam, Hawaii, United Nations : United ... Catalogue of United States Stamps) Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped By the Greatest Land Sale in History Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps & Covers 2013: Confederate States-Canal Zone-Danish West Indies-Guam-Hawaii-United Nations: United ... Postage Stamp Catalogue: U.S. Specialized) American History: The People & Events that Changed American History (People's History, American, United States of America, American Revolution, Patriot, United States History Book 1) Paraguay and the United States: Distant Allies (The United States and the Americas) War Plan Red: The United States' Secret Plan to Invade Canada and Canada's Secret Plan to Invade the United States A Guide Book of United States Paper Money 2nd Ed. (Guide Book of United States Paper Money: Complete Source) Illustrated catalogue of United States Cartridge Company's collection of firearms : the most complete collection in the United States Scott 2017 Specialized United States Postage Stamp Catalogue (Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps) Handbook of United States Coins 2017: The Official Blue Book, Paperbook Edition (Handbook of United States Coins (Paper)) Official ANA Grading Standards for United States Coins (Official American Numismatic Association Grading Standards for United States Coins) A Guide Book of United States Coins 2015: The Official Red Book Spiral (Official Red Book: A Guide Book of United States Coins (Spiral)) Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States) Quiet The Dead: A Promise McNeal Mystery (Promise McNeal Mysteries Book 1) Democracy More or Less: America's Political Reform Quandary (Cambridge Studies in Election Law and Democracy) Wilderness Trail of Love (American Wilderness Series Romance Book 1) The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (The United States in the World) Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States (Communication, Society and Politics)
