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How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity
Walker & Company
June 2007
On Sale: June 12, 2007
304 pages
ISBN: 0802715338
EAN: 9780802715333
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
With the same mix of compelling narrative history and
captivating historical argument that made his previous book,
Measuring America, such a success, Andro Linklater relates
in fascinating detail how, the borders and boundaries that
formed states and a nation inspired the sense of identity
that has have 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 , thus, defined not by
open spaces but by boundaries. “What Americanized the
immigrants was not the frontier experience” Linklater
writes, “but the fact that it took place inside the United
States frontier.” Those same borders had the ability to
divide as well as unite, as the great battle over internal
boundaries during the Civil War would show. By century’s
end, however, we were spreading U.S. power beyond our
borders, an act that, seen through Linklater’s eyes, offers
an intriguing perspective on our role in the world today.
Linklater’s great achievement is to weave these provocative
arguments into a dramatic storyline, wherein the actions of
Ellicott, Thomas Jefferson, the treasonous general James
Wilkinson, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, and numerous
hitherto invisible settlers, all illuminate the shaping of
the nation. This brilliant book will alter forever readers’
perception of America and what it means to be an American.
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