Liberty's Grid

“A deeply informed and illuminating look at something so familiar as to be almost invisible, and a wonderful cautionary tale of the havoc that a brilliant man like Jefferson can wreak out of misplaced idealism and a ‘habit of thinking in broad abstractions rather than getting bogged down in practical details.’” * Wall Street Journal *
“Alexanderʼs entertaining survey of this long-forgotten but once heated debate probes at the weird ways science and politics intersect. Readers will be utterly engrossed.” * Publisher’s Weekly *
“Despite being a book about straight lines, Liberty’s Grid includes fascinating detours—from Jefferson’s proposals for a metric system, to his suggestions for names of new states: Sylvania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia.” * History Today *

“Alexander’s book exemplifies what historians are best positioned to do: peel back our assumptions and reveal that things did not have to turn out exactly the way they did. Alexander forces us to see the familiar as new, and to understand why the course Jefferson advocated was so compelling at the time… . By uncovering the intellectual roots of what seems like a ‘natural’ part of reality, Alexander has done an immense service, and this book can be read with profit by anyone studying early American history.”

* British Journal for the History of Science *

“A beautifully written history of the physical and sociopolitical shaping of America, using the lens of land surveys and urban design… . A fascinating story about a nation being born.”

* Isis *
“Two thirds of the continental United States has been surveyed and platted in accordance with Jefferson’s idea for uniform geometric subdivision of the public lands. Thanks to Liberty’s Grid, we now have a fuller idea of why this happened and what it means.” * The Portolan *

“A must-read volume to understand the meaning, scope, and power of American continental expansion… . Essential.”

* Choice *

“How do proposed ideas weather the gauntlet of congressional debate and compromise? Alexander has given us a lively case study, showing how some geometric ideas morphed into laws and practices, thereby inducing both austere doses of symmetry and hearty dabs of freedom into America’s living spaces.”

* The Mathematical Intelligencer *

“By seeking to historicize, and ultimately defamiliarize, the grid’s otherwise overlooked presence within America’s intellectual history and broader cultural landscape, Liberty’s Grid shifts mathematics out of the realm of theory and emphasizes its potential to act in the world. Geometry shapes what we believe is possible and is thus political.”

* American Historical Review *

“Alexander is a skilled writer and a gifted storyteller, and the book is a pleasure to read. It should appeal to nearly every audience from informed general readers to professionals, and especially to historians, landscape architects, and landscape ecologists.”

* Natural Areas Journal *
“Liberty’s Grid draws a startling connection between the American love of rectilinear layout and philosophical ideas about America itself—the landscape as the graph paper our national identity is scribbled on. You’ll never look at Manhattan the same way again.” – Jordan Ellenberg, author of Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else
“Alexander’s important new book illuminates the geometrical premises and ideological implications of westward expansion and urban development, offering fresh perspectives on the conflicting and controversial ways Americans imagined their future and transformed the continent. Liberty’s Grid will provoke and inform ongoing debates about the pathways we are following—and the history we are inscribing—on our national landscape.” – Peter S. Onuf, author of Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
“Anyone interested in the history or the geography of the United States will welcome Alexander’s novel perspective on the westward expansion of the US. Alexander’s emphasis on the geometry of the development of the landscape makes this compulsively readable book a necessary contribution to the literature of Indigenous resistance.” – Michael Harris, author of Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation
“This book opens an entirely unexpected window on the cultural history of mathematics and the role of mathematics in American history and culture. A highly rewarding read for mathematicians, historians and philosophers of mathematics, cultural historians, Americanists, and those who are interested in these subjects.” – Arkady Plotnitsky, author of Logos and Alogon: Thinkable and the Unthinkable in Mathematics, from the Pythagoreans to the Moderns
“In this beautifully written book, Alexander takes on a seemingly obvious feature of American life: the open-ended, uniform grid that organizes much of the national space from Manhattan to the Western plains. But why did America became rectilinear? Alexander shows how, far from being a simple solution to practical problems, the Great American Grid embodies a distinct vision of the land and its people. In eighteenth-century America, the analytic logic of the grid became the logic of an empty, undifferentiated space ready to be colonized and exploited—a boundless space of unlimited possibilities. But other ways of perceiving and organizing space were and are possible. Alexander recounts the fascinating story of the grid—and of those who opposed it—as an ongoing story of geometrical forms and political possibilities.” – Massimo Mazzotti, author of Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity