American Boundaries
American Boundaries

Author: Bill Hubbard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0226355934

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For anyone who has looked at a map of the United States and wondered how Texas and Oklahoma got their Panhandles, or flown over the American heartland and marveled at the vast grid spreading out in all directions below, American Boundaries will yield a welcome treasure trove of insight. The first book to chart the country’s growth using the boundary as a political and cultural focus, Bill Hubbard’s masterly narrative begins by explaining how the original thirteen colonies organized their borders and decided that unsettled lands should be held in trust for the common benefit of the people. Hubbard goes on to show—with the help of photographs, diagrams, and hundreds of maps—how the notion evolved that unsettled land should be divided into rectangles and sold to individual farmers, and how this rectangular survey spread outward from its origins in Ohio, with surveyors drawing straight lines across the face of the continent. Mapping how each state came to have its current shape, and how the nation itself formed within its present borders, American Boundaries will provide historians, geographers, and general readers alike with the fascinating story behind those fifty distinctive jigsaw-puzzle pieces that together form the United States.

Border Land, Border Water
Border Land, Border Water

Author: C. J. Alvarez

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 147731900X

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From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet. Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Report of the Boundary Commission Upon the Survey and Re-Marking of the Boundary Between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891-1896 ..
Report of the Boundary Commission Upon the Survey and Re-Marking of the Boundary Between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891-1896 ..

Author: International Boundary Commission (Unite

Publisher: Franklin Classics

Published: 2018-10-12

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780342563517

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

State and National Boundaries of the United States
State and National Boundaries of the United States

Author: Gary Alden Smith

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-06-08

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1476604347

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With the exception of oceans, boundaries are artificial, man-made divisions of geography that many times make little sense and sometimes no sense at all. For example, why does the northern boundary of Minnesota protrude into Canada? Why does West Virginia have two panhandles? Why do Pennsylvania and Delaware have a common boundary that is a circle segment? Why do the boundaries of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah consist entirely of lines of latitude and longitude? The answers to these questions and many more can be found in this book, which explains why and how state boundaries are placed where they are. It begins with an introduction that provides general information about boundary placement, colonial boundaries, formation of territories, surveying and Supreme Court rulings. The 50 states are divided into ten regions (New England, Mid-Atlantic, Upper South, Lower South, Great Lakes, North Central, South Central, Rocky Mountain, West, and Noncontiguous). The text for each state begins with an overview of that state's boundaries that becomes more specific as its different boundaries are considered. The appendices include interesting facts about each state, citizen and state nicknames, and dates territories were created and states entered the Union. Richly illustrated with 138 maps.

Line in the Sand
Line in the Sand

Author: Rachel St. John

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-11-25

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0691156131

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Line in the Sand details the dramatic transformation of the western U.S.-Mexico border from its creation at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the emergence of the modern boundary line in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this sweeping narrative, Rachel St. John explores how this boundary changed from a mere line on a map to a clearly marked and heavily regulated divide between the United States and Mexico. Focusing on the desert border to the west of the Rio Grande, this book explains the origins of the modern border and places the line at the center of a transnational history of expanding capitalism and state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moving across local, regional, and national scales, St. John shows how government officials, Native American raiders, ranchers, railroad builders, miners, investors, immigrants, and smugglers contributed to the rise of state power on the border and developed strategies to navigate the increasingly regulated landscape. Over the border's history, the U.S. and Mexican states gradually developed an expanding array of official laws, ad hoc arrangements, government agents, and physical barriers that did not close the line, but made it a flexible barrier that restricted the movement of some people, goods, and animals without impeding others. By the 1930s, their efforts had created the foundations of the modern border control apparatus. Drawing on extensive research in U.S. and Mexican archives, Line in the Sand weaves together a transnational history of how an undistinguished strip of land became the significant and symbolic space of state power and national definition that we know today.