Measuring America - How the United States was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History

Touch of foxing.

No visitor to the USA can fail to be struck by the way in which order has been imposed on its cast landscape: the spectacular grid of city blocks, the squared-off farms, the long straight roads. How was such a coherent pattern applied across a 3000-mile continent? In 1785 Congress authorised thge survey and sale of the land west of the Ohio river. In what proved to be the greatest property deal of all time, the US government eventually measured out and sold over a billion acres, stretching from Canada to Mexico... shaping the American landscape, and the American psyche, in the process...