Liberty’s Grid
A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America
Amir Alexander
Mastery over the vast spaces of the continent has engendered controversy ever since Americans began looking west. In Liberty’s Grid, A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America, Amir Alexander puts readers into the middle of a clash between two incompatible visions of American space. According to one vision, the American continent is empty, nothing but a vast unresisting terrain awaiting its settlers to make their mark. And according to the other, the land is already full to the brim, rich in wonders both natural and human, which settlers would disrupt at their peril.
Each of these visions left deep marks on the continent. Those who believed that America is a blank slate, and ripe for the taking, set out to mark it with an immense mathematical grid that covered both its rural and urban spaces. Those who believed that America’s strength lies in its natural wonders countered the grid at every step, instituting natural-style urban parks at the heart of rectilinear cities, leafy suburbs on their margins, and national parks and preserves throughout the rural grid. The struggle between these two conflicting yet intertwined visions has been going on for two centuries, and has informed not only the physical landscape, but the political one as well.
In his previous two books, Infinitesimal and Proof!, Amir Alexander chronicled the roles that mathematical ideas have played in the creation of the modern world. In Liberty’s Grid, he brings that story to America, and deepens our appreciation of the landscapes that we all know.
Published by University of Chicago Press
Praise for 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
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
UCLA math historian Alexander sets forth an enthralling exploration … [His] entertaining survey of this long-forgotten but once heated debate probes at the weird ways science and politics intersect. Readers will be utterly engrossed — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
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
