"[Linklater] has the talent not just to let us know how things work, but to make us want to know...A magical mystery tour that leaves the reader both mildly footsore and exhilarated by unexpected connections."

--The New York Times

"Remarkable...Linklater traces with unusual elegance and a keen wit the epic story of measuring our nation, charting the process by which... new states were literally bought into being."

--Los Angeles Times

This is the slory of how the founding fathers gave birth to land ownership in America.

In 1790, America’s debt was enormous, having depleted the country’s money and supplies during its victorious fight for independence. Before the nation’s greatest asset--the land west of the Ohio River--could be sold, it had to be measured out and mapped. Measuring America tells the fascinating story of how we ultimately gained the American Customary System--the last traditional system in the world--and how one man’s surveying chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, and on our culture from coast to coast.

Introduction

ONE

The Invention of Landed Property 

TWO

Precise Confusion 

THREE

Who Owned America? 

FOUR

Life, Liberty, or What? 

FIVE

Simple Arithmetic 

SIX

A Line Drawn in the Wilderness 

SEVEN

The French Dimension 

EIGHT

Democratic Decimals

NINE

The Birth of the Metric System

TEN

Dombey’s Luck 

ELEVEN

The End of Putnam 

TWELVE

The Immaculate Grid

THIRTEEN

The Shape of Cities

FOURTEEN

Hassler’s Passion 

FIFTEEN

The Dispossessed 

SIXTEEN

The Limit of Enclosure

SEVENTEEN

Four Against Ten 

EIGHTEEN

Metric Triumphant 

EPILOGUE

The Witness Tree

Acknowledgments 

Appendix: General Tables of Units of Measurement 

Notes

Bibliography 

Index