The First Mapping of America

The First Mapping of America
Author: Alex Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2017-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786733218

The First Mapping of America tells the story of the General Survey. At the heart of the story lie the remarkable maps and the men who made them - the commanding and highly professional Samuel Holland, Surveyor-General in the North, and the brilliant but mercurial William Gerard De Brahm, Surveyor-General in the South. Battling both physical and political obstacles, Holland and De Brahm sought to establish their place in the firmament of the British hierarchy. Yet the reality in which they had to operate was largely controlled from afar, by Crown administrators in London and the colonies and by wealthy speculators, whose approval or opposition could make or break the best laid plans as they sought to use the Survey for their own ends.

Georgia Land Surveying History and Law

Georgia Land Surveying History and Law
Author: Farris W. Cadle
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 597
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820312576

Georgia Land Surveying History and Law is the first definitive history and analysis of Georgia’s land system and the laws that govern it. The book’s opening section tells the story of the surveyor’s role in transforming Georgia from a frontier to a bounded, populated, and productive colony and state. Paced by anecdotes of surveyors’ wilderness experiences, the narrative traces the evolution of Georgia’s land subdivision system, beginning with the original, and ultimately impractical, scheme of land granting and rectangular land subdivision under the Trustees of the Georgia Colony. The volume then covers the more flexible but easily abused headright procedure, and the subsequent lottery and succession of systematic, rectangular surveys under which most of the state was laid out and granted in the early nineteenth century. Finally, in lay terms supported by meticulous citation of authority, the volume discusses the legal aspects of land surveying, including the interests that make up land ownership, the transfer of real property, the interpretation of property descriptions, the location of boundaries, riparian and littoral rights, and other topics. The book examines every point concerning boundaries found in any Georgia case or statute. Based solidly on primary sources and the author’s fifteen years of experience in land surveying and title abstracting, Georgia Land Surveying History and Law is an exhaustively researched and scholarly reference that will be useful to surveyors, title attorneys, title abstractors, real estate professionals, geographers, cartographers, historians, and genealogists.

The New Map of Empire

The New Map of Empire
Author: S. Max Edelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674978994

After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic. Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented. Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.

The Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775: A-K

The Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775: A-K
Author:
Publisher: HarperCollins Christian Publishing
Total Pages: 1979
Release: 2008
Genre: Frontier and pioneer life
ISBN: 1418560642

"Covers all major wars and conflicts in North America from the late-15th to mid-18th centuries, with discussions of key battles, diplomatic efforts, military technologies, and strategies and tactics ... [E]xplores the context for conflict, with essays on competing colonial powers, every major Native American tribe, all important political and military leaders, and a range of social and cultural issues."--Publisher's Web site.

Quarters

Quarters
Author: John Gilbert McCurdy
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2019-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501736620

When Americans declared independence in 1776, they cited King George III "for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." In Quarters, John Gilbert McCurdy explores the social and political history behind the charge, offering an authoritative account of the housing of British soldiers in America. Providing new interpretations and analysis of the Quartering Act of 1765, McCurdy sheds light on a misunderstood aspect of the American Revolution. Quarters unearths the vivid debate in eighteenth-century America over the meaning of place. It asks why the previously uncontroversial act of accommodating soldiers in one's house became an unconstitutional act. In so doing, Quarters reveals new dimensions of the origins of Americans' right to privacy. It also traces the transformation of military geography in the lead up to independence, asking how barracks changed cities and how attempts to reorder the empire and the borderland led the colonists to imagine a new nation. Quarters emphatically refutes the idea that the Quartering Act forced British soldiers in colonial houses, demonstrates the effectiveness of the Quartering Act at generating revenue, and examines aspects of the law long ignored, such as its application in the backcountry and its role in shaping Canadian provinces. Above all, Quarters argues that the lessons of accommodating British troops outlasted the Revolutionary War, profoundly affecting American notions of place. McCurdy shows that the Quartering Act had significant ramifications, codified in the Third Amendment, for contemporary ideas of the home as a place of domestic privacy, the city as a place without troops, and a nation with a civilian-led military.

Oglethorpe in Perspective

Oglethorpe in Perspective
Author: Phinizy Spalding
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2006-05-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0817353453

Nine essays that attempt to answer some of the questions that continually surface when Oglethorpe's name is mentioned.

The World of Thomas Jeremiah

The World of Thomas Jeremiah
Author: William R. Ryan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2010-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199750904

This book profiles the port of Charles Town, South Carolina, during the two-year period leading up to the Declaration of Independence. It focuses on the dramatic hanging and burning of Thomas Jeremiah, a free black harbor pilot and firefighter accused by the patriot party of plotting a slave insurrection during the tumultous spring and summer of 1775. To examine the world of this wealthy, slave-holding African American through his trial and execution, William R. Ryan uses a wide array of letters, naval records, personal and official correspondence, memoirs, and newspapers. He shows that the black majority of the South Carolina Low Country managed to assist the British in their invasion efforts, despite patriot attempts to frighten Afro-Carolinians into passivity and submission. Although Whigs attempted, through brutality and violence, to keep their slaves from participating in the conflict, Afro-Carolinians became actively involved in the struggle between colonists and the Crown as spies, messengers, navigators and marauders. The book demonstrates that an understanding of what was going on in this vital seaport during the mid-1770s has broader implications for the study of the Atlantic world, African American history, naval history, urban race relations, labor history, and the turbulent politics of America's move toward independence.

Slave Counterpoint

Slave Counterpoint
Author: Philip D. Morgan
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 730
Release: 2012-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807838535

On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.

The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina

The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina
Author: Lawrence S. Rowland
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1643361635

The complex, colorful history of South Carolina's southeastern corner In the first volume of The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, three distinguished historians of the Palmetto State recount more than three centuries of Spanish and French exploration, English and Huguenot agriculture, and African slave labor as they trace the history of one of North America's oldest European settlements. From the sixteenth-century forays of the Spaniards to the invasion of Union forces in 1861, Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers, Jr., chronicle the settlement and development of the geographical region comprised of what is now Beaufort, Jasper, Hampton, and part of Allendale counties. The authors describe the ill-fated attempts of the Spanish and French to settle the Port Royal Sound area and the arrival of the British in 1663, which established the Beaufort District as the southern frontier of English North America. They tell of the region's bloody Indian Wars, participation in the American Revolution, and golden age of prosperity and influence following the introduction of Sea Island cotton. In charting the approach of civil war, Rowland, Moore, and Rogers relate Beaufort District's decisive role in the Nullification Crisis and in the cultivation, by some of the district's native sons, of South Carolina's secessionist movement. Of particular interest, they profile the local African American, or Gullah, population - a community that has become well known for the retention of its African cultural and linguistic heritage.