Measuring America: How An Untamed Wilderness Shaped The United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy - Hardcover

Andro Linklater

3.88

478 ratings by Goodreads

9780786253708: Measuring America: How An Untamed Wilderness Shaped The United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786253703 ISBN 13: 9780786253708

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2003

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The United States had to pay for the war that won its freedom by selling land. It first had to be measured and mapped. Here is the fascinating story of how our unique system of weights and measures was achieved.

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About the Author:

Andro Linklater was born in Scotland and educated at Oxford University where he studied history. For several years he lived in the United States, working variously in politics and and the art, but returned to Britain to teach in Scotland and London. For the past twenty years he has been a full-time writer and journalist.

Andro has written extensively for a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including The Spectator, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Reader's Digest and Daily Mail. Assignments have taken him to many parts of the world including Patagonia, the South Pacific and the Arctic Circle. He has written frequently on science and technology, notably a major report on Chernobyl for the Telegraph Magazine, and an early investigation of genetic engineering for the Reader's Digest. His book reviews have appeared regularly in The Spectator, The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

Of Measuring America, he says "Like most visitors to the United States, it was the shape of the place I first fell in love with ― the spectacular grid of city blocks, the squared-off, American Gothic farms, and the long, straight, section roads that caught the imagination of Kerouac and every drive-movie director you can think of. During the time I lived there, I never questioned why this should be so, it simply seemed American. Since then, however, I have returned frequently as a visitor and each time I came back, it always struck me as utterly astonishing that such a coherent pattern could have occurred across a 3000 mile-wide continent. How did it happen? Who shaped this gigantic land? Measuring America is my attempt to answer those questions."

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Make room on the library shelf for the never-before-told saga of the survey that converted the vast wilderness west of the Ohio River into a commodity marked out for government sale. In chronicling this saga, Linklater brings to life a host of compelling personalities--Edmund Gunter, the indifferent rector who gave American surveyors a revolutionary new measuring chain; Thomas Hutchins, the national geographer whose character of perfect integrity could not hide his miserable ineptitude; Ferdinand Hassler, the government appointee so monomaniacal for accuracy that he brushed snuff into his eyes to stimulate optical acuity; Joseph Dombey, the unlucky martyr who died in a Montserrat prison while trying to bring metric measures to America. But above the fascinating personalities loom huge political and economic issues. With spare lucidity, Linklater probes the conflicting pressures in the process that turned unmapped tribal lands into a plotted grid of properties for purchase, bringing much-needed revenue into the federal coffers but also setting loose a frenzy of land speculation. At the heart of this overheated process, Thomas Jefferson deployed his multifaceted genius against the greed of the speculators, heroically striving to make the unprecedented land sale foster the freedoms of democracy and the cause of progressive reform. But in Jefferson' s failure to guide America away from Gunter's traditional four-based measures toward a more rational decimal system, Linklater limns one of history's great missed opportunities. At a time when America finds itself a foot-and-pound island in a metric sea, the fascinating story of this missed opportunity holds considerable relevance for America's commercial future. Bryce Christensen
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