Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy

摘要

"How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History" is the more accurate subtitle of the paperback edition of this book. In either edition, Measuring America is an intelligent and lively book that deserves a place on the reading list for any undergraduate American history course. The cover of the cloth edition features young surveyor George Washington casually holding a Gunter's chain while assistants prepare to pound a peg into the ground at the end of the chain. It also shows inset heads of Thomas Jefferson and Ferdinand Hassler, whom Jefferson appointed chief of the first official geodetic survey of the Atlantic coast. Inside, Andro Link-later narrates the connections and tensions among these symbols of nationhood, geographical expansion, and standardization of measures. Gunter's chain is his heroic instrument that made "democracy," or Jefferson's dream of sturdy yeomen working small landholdings, come true. However, he does not explicitly discuss the linkage of property ownership to the right to vote in the new republic.