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    Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History
    Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History
    Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Written by Andro Linklater

    Narrated by Alan Sklar

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    "This expertly written and eminently enjoyable chronicle is highly recommended for history and history of science collections." -Library Journal

    "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." -Booklist, Starred Review

    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. 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 1, 2003
    ISBN9781400170906
    Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History
    Author

    Andro Linklater

    Andro Linklater has been a writer for twenty years. He is the author of The Black Watch (with his father, Eric Linklater); Charlotte Despard: A Life; Compton Mackenzie: A Life (winner of the Scottish Arts Council Biography of the Year Award); Wild People: Travels with Borneo’s Head Hunters; and The Code of Love (Weidenfeld 2000).

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    Reviews for Measuring America

    4/5

    86 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Much of the book was interesting and enlightening. But unexpectedly, the author spends a great deal of time on systems of units and measurement. While the importance and influence of this becomes clear, I was disappointed by how much of this aspect was emphasized at the expense of more of the history of surveying particular parts of the U.S. The author’s book The Fabric of America may be more along the lines of what I was expecting with this one.

      The audiobook ended before the book was finished. The full book appears to have 16 chapters, but the audiobook ended abruptly at the end of chapter 15.
    • 4/5
      Genealogists are familiar with township maps that show where their ancestors lived. Measuring America shows how those boundaries were put in place. And the author pins the blame on a single surveyor for the countless land disputes in Kentucky and Tennessee that forced settlers to move on when their land claims were disallowed (and how Indiana and Illinois fared much better in that regard). Measuring America also demonstrates the importance of standardized weights and measures to the economic development on the frontier and how the US lagged in that department. Who knew THAT was such a big deal!This is the kind of history book I like to read: one that includes not only the dates and facts, but the personalities behind them. Andro Linklater is a terrific storyteller -- and his book is well written and a quick, fun read. 22 Jul 2010
    • 3/5
      This is a book for anyone who wondered about the lines on the maps of the United States. In it Andro Linklater, a British writer and journalist, provides a history of the surveying of America. This is necessarily a two-part task, as not only does he describe the development and importance of surveying in shaping America, but it also requires him to explain the simultaneous development of uniform measurement in the Western world. For while people were familiar with units of measurement, those units themselves were not standardized, as lengths, along with weights and volume differed from place to place during the colonial period.

      Yet the colonists already had access to the first standard measurement, the 22-foot-long chain introduced by the 17th century mathematician Edmund Gunter. His chain was the first element of precision that made the surveying – and through that, the selling – of the vast American territories England claimed in North America. Linklater describes this tandem development well, conveying both the importance of surveying and measurement in shaping the history of the country, as well as the numerous frustrations involved in getting it right. What began as an often haphazard assessment gradually became a more professional, systematic approach by the mid-19th century, creating the checkerboard pattern and straight lines visible from the skies overhead today.

      Linklater’s book is a readable history of a mundane yet critical aspect of American history. With a scope spanning from Tudor England to a land office in modern-day Sacramento he conveys something of the long process of development that brought us to where we are now. Yet his examination of surveying rests in a bed of outdated interpretations about American history. These are minor and do little to effect the author’s argument, yet they are a weakness that diminishes from the overall value of the book. All of this makes Linklater’s book a useful look at a long overlooked element shaping American history, yet one that is strongest when focusing on its main subject and not when discussing American history more broadly.
    • 3/5
      An interesting tale (told in a laborious manner) of the link between democracy and the sale/settling of surveyed land in early USA. And why they ended up with decimal currency but imperial measures.Read July 2004
    • 4/5
      Currently reading - and thus far, really enjoyable. It reads at a good pace without being bogged down and dragging, but still has a lot of substance. It is an interesting perspective on a complicated aspect of American history.
    • 5/5
      Linklater has achieved that almost perfect fusion of history, science and biography that a great many authors have aimed for - and fallen short of - in recent years. He relates the story of the evolution of standard weights and measures in Europe and the colonial and post-colonial Americas. But rather than the dry account that this might have been, he spices the story with observations about human foibles, greed and ambition. The reader will become aware that the story couldn't really have been told any other way - so closely did the abstract concepts of weights and measures intersect with the lives of individuals and nations. The universal acts of owning or trading goods or land, and of delineating political boundaries involves an acceptance of some kind of weight or measure, and Linklater illustrates how little consensus existed as to what they were even until recent times.The abstract is given real substance, and his story as a whole finds its central theme, as Linklater discusses the partition of the American colonies, Territories and States. He describes the process as essentially one of creating 'property' and hence wealth and how the way that property was divided, sold and possessed gave the European settlements in North America a particular character that broke with the traditions of old Europe. It has to be acknowledged that the story of the development of the United States encompasses many more influences than Linklater addresses here. But if the reader understands that Linklater is speaking from the area of his expertise - and enthusiasm - then his thesis can be seen as a very worthwhile contribution to the bigger picture, the other parts of which the reader can pursue elsewhere. Personally, I was most engaged by Linklater's story of how the European States, corporations and individuals came into ownership of all of the lands of North America to the disadvantage of the native American people who had lived on them up to that time. He touches upon the fundamental disconnect between the attitudes of the native Americans to the land and the European view of it as property that could be measured and turned into a commodity.It was here I wished there had been more detail and a deeper discussion about the relationship between the native Americans and the land. Linklater gives due attention to the often shameful story of their dispossession of vast tracts of the North American continent. But I have the sense that he has committed an act of dispossession himself by leaving the reader to understand that the native Americans had a less precise sense of place and boundaries than Europeans and that the story of marking and measuring territory only started with the colonial surveyors. Linklater acknowledges that there is a huge divide between the concepts of 'custody' and 'ownership' of land. But I am left to wonder whether his inference that ownership created the need for (and was created by the existence of) precise measurement, while the native American concept of 'custody' did not, might simply be a reflection of his lack of familiarity with native American traditions and practices.This, however, is a minor quibble with a book that should be regarded as essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the United States, of cartography, or the science of measures. For those interested in the clash between concepts of place and measurement between different cultures I can recommend in addition to this book both Hugh Brody's 'Maps and Dreams' (relating the experience of native Americans in British Columbia) and Hugh Beach's 'A Year in Lapland: Guest of the Reindeer Herders'.
    • 5/5
      A tremendously interesting book about the history of measurement standards and surveying, most particularly in the young United States but also in France and Britain. Well documented (though the notes are not indicated in the text) and a very lively read. If you've ever wondered where the heck some of our odd units of measure came from, or why the United States doesn't use the metric system, this one is recommended.
    • 3/5
      Until I read "Measuring America", I was only vaguely aware of the importance of surveying to the economic and political history of the United States. Like most students, I had read that George Washington was a surveyor, but I did not know that he earned more income in that occupation than he did as President, or that his estate on the Potomac was a direct result of his work as a surveyor. The ownership of a continent could not become legal until it was clear what was owned, and that task depended on agreement upon a system by which the measurements were to be made. Contemporary with the French meridian survey (see last month's Pick), Thomas Jefferson devised his own version of a "metric system", based on the length of an iron rod that swings with a one-second period. The system had thoroughly decimal relationships for length, area, volume (one decimal ounce to be the mass of one cubic inch of rainwater, and the inch to be one-tenth of a decimal foot, which was based on the length of the iron rod. Science and technology are not the real focus of "Measuring America" but, as the book makes clear, commerce has always depended on a reliable system of measurement.
    • 4/5
      I am enjoying this book. It's a very interesting perspective on our history.
    • 5/5
      I knew why there was something in the maps that hinted at deeper meanings. This book helped me clarify/realize my visual intuitions with historical data. There's much to mine in these fields.I'm an american injun---lines on maps are not things I celebrate. maybe someday an aboriginal american will add a commentary to the division of the land, the partition of the spirit that was once whole.
    • 4/5
      The perfect book, if your interests include the intersection of: - geography- surveyingand- the history of the settlement of the American interior.
    • 5/5
      Nearly exceptional. Well documented.