Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History

Rating:
Summary: The Importance of Land Ownership
Review: Andro Linklater describes the importance of private property (land ownership) to the formation of a dynamic economy and a democratic government.

The most urgent challenge facing the newly-independent United States in 1784 was how to pay for the war that won the country its independence; the debt of the new republic was enormous. The country's greatest asset was the land west of the Ohio River, but in order to sell this huge territory, the land had to be surveyed; measured and mapped. And, before that could be done, a uniform set of weights and measures had to be chosen for the new republic out of a morass of some 100,000 different units that were in use in daily life. This is the story of surveying and measuring and mapping and real estate.

George Washington began as a surveyor.

I read the pre-publication galley edition. I love this book and I understand the final hardcover edition has maps.

Dan Poynter, ParaPublishing.com.

Rating:
Summary: The Squaring of America
Review: 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. The squares impressed themselves on urban consciousness, too. The beautifully laid out Washington, D.C. with its frequent diagonals was seldom copied, as the grid alone was easier to lay out and to sell segmentally. Circleville, Ohio, was originally laid out as a series of rings and radians, but was quickly converted to a grid once people started residing there.

In the latter part of the 19th century, Chief Seattle complained, "We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?" Fairly or not, logically or not, the answer was that marking the land made ownership, and ownership made America. Measuring the land and speculating in real estate might seem an unlikely subject for an interesting book, but this is a surprising and sometimes romantic tale. Linklater's readable history is a valuable commentary on a particular way we became particularly American.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting history
Review: I really enjoyed this book. This is one example of the kind of history that can be informative and yet hold the reader's attention, though I admit it is a subject that has interested me a lot anyway.

The book's primary thrust is the history leading to the fact that we do not normally use the metric system in the U. S. I must say that it makes a good case for an idea that I'd never run across before: that this is primarily because the French, in devising the definition of the meter, departed from an idea that many people, including Thomas Jefferson, thought would give the most internationally reproducible standard. Reading this book, it really seems he has his facts right, and his argument is convincing.

I found that the book clarified a number of points that I have wondered about.

One negative thing is that his appendix in the end has some (probably typographical) errors: one table shows 101, 102, etc. for what slould really be 10 with exponents 1, 2, etc.) and in several other tables, "grains" becomes "gains."

Rating:
Summary: Measuring America
Review: Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy is a book filled with interesting information about how the government needed an accurate way to measure and sell lands west of the Ohio River.

The United States' greatest asset was the land west of the Ohio River, but in order to sell this huge territory, it first had to be surveyed... measured and mapped. But before that could be accomplished, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic. In January 1790, George Washington put the establishment of a single system of weights and measures as one of his most urgent priorities... defense and currency were only deemed more important.

This book is filled with interesting information about early America and tells a fascinating story of how this unique system was achieved and how it has profoundly shaped our country and its culture for more than two hundred years. This book tells us how the traditional view of the world was being increasingly challanged by objective reasoning.

From measuring and mapping land for ownership the story is told. There is human and intellectual drama as cities are laid out in blocks, making for a grid pattern. Weights and measures were being standardized making for better and fairer commerce. All leading to the ultimately gained American Customary System... the last traditional system in the world.

I found the book to be very readable and highly informative. It is well-written and gives the reader a broad understandng for why weights and measures were important... for without them the United States wouldn't exist.

Rating:
Summary: This book really measures up!
Review: The subtitle of this highly readable book is a bit purple -- "How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy" -- but what the author has to say makes a good case. It's also an amazingly action-packed adventure story. Any genealogist learns early the practical ins and outs of frontier settlement and the titles, grants, and other documents that land claims inevitably produce. In this country, there are two distinct methods of recording those claims: "metes and bounds" in the original colonies and some of their western lands (such as Kentucky) and in Texas, which describe the boundaries of one's land in terms of the points at which it adjoins or "meets" a neighbor's land, and the rectangular survey system developed for use in the public land states created from the nation's later territorial acquisitions. The latter is far more rational and allows a claim to be filed based on geographical location without having actually set foot on the land -- but it also requires preliminary measurement by a party of government surveyors. Linklater lays out in much detail, and with colorful anecdotes, how the first surveys were decided upon and carried out (more or less) in the Northwest Territory, and later in the Plains states and the West. He describes how, thanks to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. nearly adopted a rational metric system early in its history (which in France and Prussia was an instrument of centralized government policy), and how that goal was waylaid by clinging to Edmund Gunter's English chain/furlong system, which had the virtue of being easily understood by semi-literate surveyors with minimal mathematical skills. He relates the part played by rapacious land speculators (most of them members of the old aristocracy of New York, Massachusetts, and the Carolina low country), by frontier town-builders enamored of rectangular blocks (and why Manhattan has narrow, skimpy blocks compared to Philadelphia or Chicago), and how the railroads used the land-survey system to open up the continent while amassing enormous wealth. Though this volume is intended for the popular market, it also includes endnotes and a good bibliography.

Rating:
Summary: This book answers a lot of questions!
Review: This book draws together a broad range of history concerning measures, measurements and the people who make them. Then it tells the story of how these interactions have affected American history, politics, geography, home ownership and many other things.

Did you every wonder why the US didn't adopt the metric system when it was first proposed by France? Well (like many other things) the story I was taught in school was short, dull and misleading.

The real story is full of action and adventure.

The action involves a secret last meeting of Louis XVI with his scientific advisors the night he attempted escape, a man with a passion for collecting rare flowers, a hurricane in the Caribbean, a treacherous French governor, pirates, an Indian massacre of US Army troops on the frontier, and the struggles between Thomas Jefferson and real estate speculators!

Rating:
Summary: This book answers a lot of questions!
Review: This book draws together a broad range of history concerning measures, measurements and the people who make them. Then it tells the story of how these interactions have affected American history, politics, geography, home ownership and many other things.

Did you every wonder why the US didn't adopt the metric system when it was first proposed by France? Well (like many other things) the story I was taught in school was short, dull and misleading.

The real story is full of action and adventure.

The action involves a secret last meeting of Louis XVI with his scientific advisors the night he attempted escape, a man with a passion for collecting rare flowers, a hurricane in the Caribbean, a treacherous French governor, pirates, an Indian massacre of US Army troops on the frontier, and the struggles between Thomas Jefferson and real estate speculators!

Rating:
Summary: detailed, for sure
Review: This is that type of book that answers the question--"I wonder why so many cities are one a grid"-or variations there upon.
Author Linklater provides fascinating historical insight and overview into the mapping of America. This is an enjoyable
book with one minor--very minor--mistake. In East Liverpool, it's Ohio Route 39, not 38, that leads one to the roadside
markers for the "Point of Beginning" I visited this location last Wednesday, after work. Linklater provides the perfect description of that site, and the surveyors' task.