The fabric of America : how our borders and boundaries shaped the country and forged our national identity / Andro Linklater.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Linklater, Andro.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, American.

Group identity--United States.

Group identity.

United States.

Physical Description:

328 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm

Edition:

First U.S. edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Walker & Co. : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2007.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

The first frontier

The boundaries of power

The state as nation

The bullying states

Capital speculations

Mirrors of the Mississippi

Evidence of treachery

The reach of government

American tragedy

The values of government

The limits of freedom

The American frontier

Crossing the frontier

The end of frontiers?

Envoi.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [309]-316) and index.

ISBN:

0802715338

9780802715333

OCLC:

138533044