The fabric of America
Subtitle: how our borders and boundaries shaped the country and forged our national identity
By: Andro Linklater
Edition: 1st U.S. ed.
Publisher: Walker & Co.; Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
Published: 2007
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 328
ISBN-13: 9780802715333
Subjects: Boundaries; American National characteristics; Group identity; American national characteristics; Historical geography
Description: Historian Linklater relates how the borders and boundaries that formed states and a nation inspired the sense of identity that has ever since been central to the American experiment. Linklater opens with America's greatest surveyor, Andrew Ellicott, measuring the contentious boundary between Pennsylvania and Virginia in the summer of 1784; and he ends standing at the yellow line dividing the United States and Mexico at Tijuana. In between, he chronicles the evolving shape of the nation, physically and psychologically. As Americans pushed westward in the course of the nineteenth century, the borders and boundaries established by surveyors like Ellicott created property, uniting people in a desire for the government and laws that would protect it. Challenging Frederick Jackson Turner's famed frontier thesis, Linklater argues that we are defined not by open spaces but by boundaries.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [309]-316) and index.
Table of contents: title: The first frontier; title: The boundaries of power; title: The state as nation; title: The bullying states; title: Capital speculations; title: Mirrors of the Mississippi; title: Evidence of treachery; title: The reach of government; title: American tragedy; title: The values of government; title: The limits of freedom; title: The American frontier; title: Crossing the frontier; title: The end of frontiers?; title: Envoi.