Customer Reviews

Drawing the Line : How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A few years ago, I was kidding around with a high school senior in our school library in northern Illinois, and I quipped, "Well, as Mason said to Dixon, you've got to draw the line somewhere." I expected at least a chuckle in return. The student, academically rated in the top 10% of his class, stared blankly back at me. "Mason and Dixon?" I asked. Nothing. "The Mason-Dixon Line?" Nada. "The border between Pennsylvania and Maryland? The boundary between The North and The South? The whole premise behind the Civil War?" Nope. He had never heard of it. The Line, I mean; of course, he knew about the Civil War.

Maybe I took it for granted, since I grew up in a suburb about 25 miles north of the Line, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The Line was there, but nobody made a big deal about it. I don't recall being taught anything about it, myself. I made a mental note to someday rectify that omission.

When Thomas Pynchon's _Mason & Dixon_ was released, I was ready and interested. Ready and interested, that is, until I spied a copy in a bookstore, randomly opened it, and tried to actually read and understand the words on that single page. Hmmm. I returned the book to its display and allowed it to entice another potential buyer.

As soon as Danson's book came out, I was ready and interested in the subject matter once again. And I believe I made the right choice with this one. There's A LOT of trigonometry and technical information in parts, and all of the math teachers in my past wouldn't be a bit surprised that I sort of skimmed over those paragraphs. But the extent of the politics and 18th-century science involved is intriguing. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had to contend with scientific authorities and governmental offices on both sides of the Atlantic -- not to mention local hostilities between European settlers and native Indians. In spite of a variety of challenges, they were ultimately successful in their mission and got little recognition (and even less pay) for their hard work in the colonial wilderness.

My favorite passages in _Drawing the Line_ were in the details surrounding the actual surveying of the PA-MD border, which had to be done in four separate phases. I followed the text along with a road atlas in my lap and could envision some of the familiar terrain. And I nodded at the descriptions of violent thunderstorms and crippling blizzards. Been there, done that ... though certainly not while living in a surveyor's tent.

Reading this book will help to answer the inevitable teenager lament, "When would ANYONE ever use trigonometry in real life?" And if you have a hankering to know more about life on the North American East Coast before the Revolution, here's a way to experience it without getting cold and wet. Or scalped.

No matter what you learned or didn't learn at school about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon and the famous line(s) they drew. Its quite likely that no-one ever explained to you the how and the why of what Mason & Dixon did and how they achieved it and more to the point, just how extremely difficult and time consuming their task was in the 1760's.

To put their achievements in perspective. Then, it was probably the modern equivalent of putting a man on the moon - without a global audience.

Nowadays with modern clocks and Global Positioning satellite systems and the inclination to do so, we could do in a few days what took Mason & Dixon nearly 5 years to complete.

This book makes a good attempt to cover the how and why. It gives a lot of the back story and related history that covers the original granting by English royalty of grants of land that would eventually become the US states of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland and why the vague and incorrect nature of these original grants caused the boundary disputes between these colonies.

The book also briefly covers what Mason & Dixon did to become the right people in the right place for this surveying job. Then it covers what & some of the how, Mason & Dixon did in the actual survey and boundary determination process and also what they did separately and sometimes together during the cold winters between the surveying 'seasons' when it was too cold to continue surveying which gives some flavour of the times shortly before America declared independence - most of this comes from the Journal that Mason kept, which is now preserved in the US National Archives having been lost for many years after the War of Independence.

Towards the end of the book, it covers what happened to Mason & Dixon after they left America and returned to England.

The appendix has more detail on how the boundaries were surveyed given that the Delaware/Maryland boundary needed to be 80 miles long, dead straight and on a 3 degrees west of true north angle and touching a 12 mile radius circle at the other end - something that had not been accomplished before they did it.

While I enjoyed this book immensely, I felt that the book lacked some of the real explanation of the finer points of how Mason & Dixon did their survey. While the text had 1 small map of the work Mason & Dixon did - I also found that a lack of any more detailed maps did not help me to understand what the surveying problems actually were - indeed I only know about this as I read up elsewhere [the Delaware Geographical societies web site has a excellent item on this] and also by studying a modern atlas of the area I got some idea of the problems from these maps.

If I compare this book to Dana Sobel's Longitude which is set around the same time and has a degree of overlap with people, places and events, I think that the Longitude book [especially the illustrated version] is a much, much better book. Longitude reads like a good novel about events that actually happened.

This book is more pedestrian and is not quite up to the same mark as even the original Longitude book without all the pictures. At the end of Longitude I cared more for John Harrison and the way he was treated than I cared about Mason & Dixon after reading this book.

Which is sad - all three men are up there on my list of people we all should know about but sadly don't. This book will help alleviate that problem for Mason & Dixon.

However, I'll look forward to reading the "Illustrated Mason & Dixon" by the same author when and if, it is ever written and published.

In the meantime this book is a good one to read if you want to know much more about Mason & Dixon and that famous line than what you were taught at school.

Who hasn't heard of Mason and Dixon but Drawing the Line makes them seem like old friends. This is one of those books you occasionally find that gives you `two for the price of one'.
The book begins with the founding of Maryland and Pennsylvania and background to the quarrels between the colonies - interesting things I never knew about America and Britain. Danson then tells about contemporary astronomy science and surveying, which is equally interesting. There are no maths or complex equations (sorry Dreckman and Lorenzi but I couldn't find any and I read the whole book) but there is an appendix with technical explanations for those who like that sort of thing but I skipped it.
The story is how Mason and Dixon are recruited by the British Royal Society to go to South Africa to record the transit of Venus and measure the distance to the sun and on the way they are ambushed by a French warship. The excellence of their work in Africa makes them the ideal men to survey the Maryland / Pennsylvania border. Danson then follows the adventures of Mason and Dixon as they survey the borderlines and explore America. The period of their work coincides with the independence movement and the narrative is full of contemporary comment, issues and observation. They also measure a `degree of latitude' to discover the size of the earth. The book finishes with Mason and Dixon's twilite years and a bitter-sweet ending.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the excitement mixing science with history makes. It is finely pitched enough to make you think a little but you don't need to be an astrophysicist to understand or enjoy it. Excellent fun.

Most people have probably heard of the Mason-Dixon line, though they may not be aware of where or exactly what it is. I grew up less than three miles from the famous line that separates Maryland from Pennsylvania, and was aware that there were stone monuments spaced every mile along the boarder - but I had no idea of the origins of this line. Danson weaves the historical backdrop that necessitated the survey and follows Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two British astronomers, as they traveled to the colonies with their telescopes, quadrants, and mathematical expertise. A surveying job such as this required exquisite accuracy in the determination of latitude and longitude - a job for skilled astronomers in their day.

For the more technically inclined, appendices are provided that go deeper into the methods surveyors use to shoot the lines. Given the amount of astronomy involved in such a surveying job, I wish the author would have provided more detail about the instruments Dixon and Mason used to accomplish their task. I'm sure it was not Danson's intention to cover this sort of technical instrumentation in detail, but in my (biased) opinion, it would have enhanced the story. Still an excellent book and one any person interested in the history of science should read.

Drawing the Line was written to appeal to a wide readership - complex astronomy and survey maths are deliberately excluded. Nevertheless it is very gratifying when someone has a go at checking something difficult. Ed Moorehead got `hung up' on the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator and pole. The book is correct - his understandable confusion arises due to the fact that the Earth is elliptical and not circular and the fact that `astronomical' verticals do not pass through the centre of the Earth.

I found this book very interesting. Both in the facts surrounding the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line and the life of the people living at that time. The descriptions given in the book about the political power and its misuse reminded me that in those terms, things are still the same today. The brutality of some of the people toward others (both here and abroad)is still true today. It was very interesting to note that some of the people who lived such short lives did manage to accomplish quite a lot. The people seemed to endured the elements and harsh weather conditions much better back then also, without complaining. The power of a persons mind to come up with a solution about the boundary dispute and the accuracy that was attained using rather crude instruments(by todays standards)was well worth noticing. Excellant book overall. Would make a good mini-series for Ken Burns to produce.

This book is great. It takes us through the whole story and holds no blows. Danson includes the tragedies along with the triumphs making this a truly fascinating read. Most of the technical stuff is in an appendix at the back of the book. The information we need to uderstand the drawing of the line is given clearly and I'm thankful for that. Danson helped me to understand the book without being patronising. I could spend hours reading it in my favourite coffee shop.This is the best book on the Mason-Dixon Line on the market:I love it.

Edwin Danson's Drawing the Line, How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in US History provides a wealth of informaiton on the development of 18th century surveying equipment. A bit too much for me.

The jacket bills this book as the first popular history of the drawing of the Mason/Dixon line. To me, popular history is far more asseccable than the opening chapters of this book. Mr. Danson's work would be very interesting to geographers and surveyor's, but it left me struggling with too much detail about Mason and Dixon's gear and longing for more details on thier lives and personalities.

Danson does provide us details on the emense challange that Mason and Dixon faced. There was much more to drawing their famous line picking a starting point and running surveyor's chains in a straight line between Maryland and Pennslyvania.

This book provides readers with tantilizing hints about Mason and Dixon that lead one to believe they would be very interesting subjects for a biography, but we get no more about them than one gets from listening to Mark Knofpler's song "Sailing to Philadelphia". Perhaps if Danson had reversed his priorities and provided readers with more about Mason and Dixon and less about their equipment I would have rated this book higher.

Still, if you have an interest in map making or surveying or the Mason/Dixon line, Danson's book will inform you, it just doesn't entertain.

Drawing the Line was written to appeal to a wide readership - complex astronomy and survey maths are deliberately excluded. Nevertheless it is very gratifying when someone has a go at checking something difficult. Ed Moorehead got `hung up' on the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator and pole. The book is correct - his understandable confusion arises due to the fact that the Earth is elliptical and not circular and the fact that `astronomical' verticals do not pass through the centre of the Earth.

this book was novel writen with a historical basis. the book detaild greatly historical backgrounds of the main individuals as well as other important figures throughout history.