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Boundaries: How the Mason-Dixon Line Settled a Family Feud and Divided a Nation
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About Boundaries: How The Mason-Dixon Line Settled A
Product Description The Mason-Dixon Line’s history, replete with property disputes, persecution, and ideological conflicts, traverses our country’s history from its founding to today. We live in a world of boundaries — geographic, scientific, cultural, and religious. One of America’s most enduring boundaries is the Mason-Dixon Line, most associated with the divide between the North and the South and the right to freedom for all people. Sibert Medal–winning author Sally M. Walker traces the tale of the Mason-Dixon Line through family feuds, brave exploration, scientific excellence, and the struggle to define a cohesive country. But above all, this remarkable story of surveying, marking, and respecting lines of demarcation will alert young history buffs to their guaranteed right and responsibility to explore, challenge, change, and defend the boundaries that define them. From School Library Journal Gr 9 Up—With her book title reflecting both theme and structure, Walker begins with the English religious boundaries that drove the Catholic Calvert family and Quaker William Penn to seek religious freedom in their respective New World colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Conflicting royal land grants and imprecise surveys led to a disputed boundary between the colonies, eventually resolved by an accurate land survey conducted by British scientists Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Much of the book describes their work, one of the most technologically challenging surveys done to that point. The author concludes with a discussion of how their survey line became a physical and symbolic boundary that marked the divisions in pre- and post-Civil War America, concluding that it remains a representational historic link to contemporary physical and cultural boundaries. Walker's account, supplemented with numerous illustrations and maps, of the conflicts along the disputed boundary and Mason and Dixon's innovative methods of scientific surveying is comprehensive and objective but is occasionally dry, and some of the complex scientific and technical concepts will be too difficult for middle school readers. Her emphasis on the survey provides a perspective missing in titles such as John C. Davenport's The Mason-Dixon Line (Chelsea House, 2004), which focuses on the line's political and military role in the antebellum slavery debate and Civil War and the postwar cultural division between North and South. While the topic won't draw a large audience, its importance in American history makes this book a strong report choice about the boundaries that shaped our nation or science in early America.—Mary Mueller, Rolla Public Schools, MO From Booklist This thoroughly researched account of the Mason–Dixon Line encompasses a broad span of time and place, from sixteenth-century England to twentieth-century America. Walker, who wrote the Sibert Award winner Secrets of a Civil War Submarine (2005), opens with generations of the Calvert and the Penn families in England, leading up to their founding the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. After many border disputes, a commission hired Englishmen Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to set the boundary between the colonies. Using their skills in astronomy, mathematics, and surveying, they completed the task in 1768. One interesting section of the book involves the negotiations necessary before Mason and Dixon could extend their survey into Native American territory. Illustrations include maps, period documents, and photos of sites and artifacts. Many students will find the text challenging to read, particularly the sections explaining the techniques and tools that Mason and Dixon used to determine the line’s exact location. Walker’s latest book offers a good deal of pertinent information on the subject at hand, as well as some interesting sidelights on American history. Grades 8-12. --Carolyn Phelan Review [A] richly layered, thoroughly researched history of the Mason-Dixon Line.... Walker reve
