Liberty's Grid

The surprising history behind a ubiquitous facet of the United States: the gridded landscape. Fly across the United States and you'll see cities and fields organized around the grid: perpendicular streets and a patchwork of rectangular farmland. All over the country, but especially in the West, the grid has become a hallmark of American life, a framework we use to navigate the terrain. This might seem a practical utility--an easy way to divide the land. It was not. This pattern at this scale, historian and writer Amir Alexander argues, was a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a titanic rectilinear grid, aligned with the points of the compass. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible, and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it. From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty's Grid tells the story of the battle between grid-makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson's plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility, but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country's founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite's cliffs and suburbia's cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty's Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.