Download or read book Mason Dixon written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
Download or read book The History of Mason and Dixon s Line written by John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe and published by . This book was released on 1855 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of Mason and Dixon s Line written by John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe and published by . This book was released on 1855 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the demarcation of the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania that became the dividing line between free and slave states. Latrobe was a lawyer, inventor, and speaker; he was also president of the American Colonization Society (1853-90), founder of the Maryland Historical Society, and a central figure in the movement to colonize the Republic of Liberia.
Download or read book The History of Mason and Dixon s Line written by Historical Society of Pennsylvania and published by Palala Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. 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. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Exploring the Mason Dixon Line written by John Layton and published by American History Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Charles I of England granted the Calvert Family a charter for the Colony of Maryland in 1632. Forty-nine years later, in 1681, Charles II awarded the Penn Family a similar charter for Pennsylvania. However, the ambiguity of the language and lack of precision in both grants sowed the seeds of dispute over a sixty-nine mile parcel of land between the 39th and 40th degrees of North Latitude. Had the Calverts prevailed, part of the City of Philadelphia would now be in Maryland, and had the Penns succeeded Baltimore would today be in the state of Pennsylvania! Arguments between the opposing parties dragged on for more than half a century before the English Courts finally issued a decree: Neither the Calverts nor the Penns would prevail; the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania would be a line of latitude located fifteen miles due south of the most southern point in the city of Philadelphia. As a result, in 1763 two British mathematicians and surveyors-Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon-were commissioned to accurately survey and mark the 244- mile boundary between the two colonies.We all have referred to the resulting Mason Dixon Line in casual conversation as the line that divides Pennsylvania and Maryland, or perhaps as the line between the free and slave states during the Civil War. But what do we actually know about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, and why is an imaginary line named after them? Author Jack Layton decided to find out. Over the course of several years he literally walked the line, recording his observations and taking revealing photographs along the entire route. The results-informative, entertaining, ironic and amusing-form the heart of this book. Luckily for us, Charles Mason was a meticulous man who kept a detailed journal of his remarkable experiences in the New World. Mr. Layton used his daily record, kept during the three years that he and his partner spent traipsing through the mountains and valleys of America, as the backbone for this book, with liberal use of direct quotations. Amazingly, some of what the men saw and described has not changed much in the intervening two-and-a-half centuries, while other sights would not be recognizable at all today. Enjoy a trip back to colonial America. Join Jack Layton as he takes a walk in the footsteps of history, following the path blazed by two men whose names and the boundary they surveyed are today a household word-the Mason Dixon Line!
Download or read book Walkin the Line written by William Ecenbarger and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the Mason-Dixon Line could talk, here are the stories. It would tell. Pulitzerprize winning reporter and travel writer Bill Ecenbarger has walked the Mason-Dixon line - from its beginning on Fenwick Island, Delaware, to its end at Brown's Hill, Pennsylvania - diverting left and right to Interview the people who live along its border. The line was surveyed between 1763 and 1768 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to settle a dispute between Robert Penn and Lord Calvert, whose family owned what is now the state of Maryland. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed a law to abolish slavery, making the Mason-Dixon Line the divider between free and slave states. From that moment, it also became a lightning rod for racial conflict that continues to this day. This unique history/travelogue examines the influence of this great divider, which remains the most powerful symbol separating Yankee from Rebel, oatmeal from grits, North from South.
Download or read book Drawing the Line written by Edwin Danson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2001-06-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE FIRST POPULAR HISTORY OF THE MAKING OF THE MASON-DIXON LINE The Mason-Dixon line-surely the most famous surveyors' line ever drawn-represents one of the greatest and most difficult scientific achievements of its time. But behind this significant triumph is a thrilling story, one that has thus far eluded both historians and surveyors. In this engrossing narrative, professional surveyor Edwin Danson takes us on a fascinating journey with Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two gifted and exuberant English surveyors, through the fields and forests of eighteenth-century America. Vividly describing life in the backwoods and the hardships and dangers of frontier surveying, Drawing the Line discloses for the first time in 250 years many hitherto unknown surveying methods, revealing how Mason and Dixon succeeded where the best American surveyors of the period failed. In accessible, ordinary language, Danson masterfully throws the first clear light on the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line. Set in the social and historical context of pre-Revolutionary America, this book is a spellbinding account of one of the great and historic achievements of its time. Advance Praise for Drawing the Line "Drawing the Line combines a fast-moving story, a human drama, and a clear account of surveying in the era of George Washington. An intriguing interaction of politics and science."-CHARLES ROYSTER, Boyd Professor of History, Louisiana State University, and Winner of the Bancroft Prize in History
Download or read book The Evolution of the Mason and Dixon Line written by Morgan Poitiaux Robinson and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-06-03 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mason and Dixon line was originally intended to show the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (part of Virginia until 1863) It was first surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon between 1763 and 1767. As time passed it was also seen as a line between those who allowed and who did not allow slavery.
Download or read book Boundaries written by Sally M. Walker and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of Secrets of a Civil War Submarine traces the history of the Mason-Dixon Line as reflected by family feuds, exploration, scientific advancement and the cultural conflicts between America's northern and southern states.
Download or read book Stealing Freedom Along the Mason Dixon Line written by Milt Diggins and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery, freedom, and kidnapping in the mid-Atlantic. This is the story of Thomas McCreary, a slave catcher from Cecil County, Maryland. Reviled by some, proclaimed a hero by others, he first drew public attention in the late 1840s for a career that peaked a few years after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Living and working as he did at the midpoint between Philadelphia, an important center for assisting fugitive slaves, and Baltimore, a major port in the slave trade, his story illustrates in raw detail the tensions that arose along the border between slavery and freedom just prior to the Civil War. McCreary and his community provide a framework to examine slave catching and kidnapping in the Baltimore-Wilmington-Philadelphia region and how those activities contributed to the nation’s political and visceral divide.
Download or read book The Scary Mason Dixon Line written by Trudier Harris and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. Harris explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way. Harris considers native-born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works Harris examines date from Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa's poems and Baldwin's play, as well as male and female authors, Harris demonstrates that the writers' preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender. Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, Harris asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing. A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line superbly demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity.
Download or read book The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon s Mason Dixon written by Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2009 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays examining the interface between 18th- and 20th-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware, marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor, and "Pynchonesque" has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns -- and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the "military-industrial complex." In short, Pynchon's novels were the sine qua non of postmodernism; Mason & Dixon went further, using the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an 18th century when "America" was being formed as both place and idea. Pynchon's focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, as he levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. This volume of new essays studies the interface between 18th- and 20th-century cultureboth in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon's work, as the contributors take up the linkages between the 18th and 20th centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as withthe literary text itself. Contributors: Mitchum Huehls, Brian Thill, Colin Clarke, Pedro Garcia-Caro, Dennis Lensing, Justin M. Scott Coe, Ian Copestake, Frank Palmeri. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds is Professor and Chair of the English Department at SUNY Brockport.
Download or read book Mason Dixon Fourth Grade Disasters written by Claudia Mills and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here's the second entry in veteran author Claudia Mills' charming middle-grade series, which finds the lovably sardonic title character starting the fourth grade, which he's dreading: everyone in fourth grade is expected to join the school choir. And sing. In front of everyone. Mason can't think of many things he enjoys less than singing. But performing in front of other people might come close; Mason devises a foolproof plan that will keep him out of the spotlight on concert night. Of course, in the world of Mason Dixon, there is no such thing as a foolproof plan. There is only disaster.
Download or read book MASON AND DIXON S LINE written by JAMES. VEECH and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mason Dixon Line written by John Davenport and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the history of the boundary which served as the barrier between the North and the South and represented the tensions over slavery.
Download or read book Drawing the Line written by Edwin Danson and published by John Wiley and Sons. This book was released on 2001 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the social and historical context of pre-Revolutionary America, this book is a spellbinding account of one of the great and historic achievements of its time."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon written by Charles Mason and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
