edited by Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute.
ISBN
0807847348 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Place of Publication
Chapel Hill
Publisher
University of North Carolina Press,
Date of Publication
c1998.
Physical Description
x, 390 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.
Notes
"Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, the Newberry Library, Chicago, and the Historic New Orleans Collection."
Includes bibliographical references (p. 361-382) and index.
Contents
Introduction : on the connection of frontiers / Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute -- Shamokin, "the very seat of the Prince of darkness": unsettling the early American frontier / James H. Merrell -- Metaphor, meaning, and misunderstanding : language and power on the Pennsylvania frontier / Jane T. Merritt -- Black "go-betweens" and the mutability of "race," status, and identity on New York's pre-revolutionary frontier / William B. Hart -- "Insidious friends" : gift giving and the Cherokee-British alliance in the Seven Years' War / Gregory Evans Dowd --"Domestick ... quiet being broke" : gender conflict among Creek Indians in the eighteenth century / Claudio Saunt -- Pigs and hunters : "rights in the woods" on the trans-Appalachian frontier / Stephen Aron -- Distinctions and partitions amongst us : identity and interaction in the revolutionary Ohio Valley / Elizabeth A. Perkins -- "Noble actors" upon "the theatre of honour" : power and civility in the Treaty of Greenville / Andrew R.L. Cayton -- To live among us : accommodation, gender, and conflict in the Western Great Lakes region, 1760-1832 / Lucy Eldersveld Murphy -- "More motley than Mackinaw" : from ethnic mixing to ethnic cleansing on the frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783-1833 / John Mack Faragher -- Remembering American frontiers : King Philip's War and the American imagination / Jill Lepore.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-292) and index.
Summary
"Measuring America is the fascinating, provocative, and eye-opening story of why America has ended up with its unique system of weights and measures -the American Customary System, unlike any other in the world- and how this has profoundly shaped our country and culture. In the process, Measuring America reveals the colossal power contained inside the acres and miles, ounces and pounds, that we use every day without ever realizing their significance. " [from the publisher]