| Sumario: | American attitudes towards the land were shaped by the great rectangular survey that carved the western United States into a uniform rectilinear grid, as precise as mathematical graphing paper. Initiated by Thomas Jefferson in 1784, the survey recast North America into a land estranged from its people, a featureless blank slate modeled on absolute mathematical space. This mathematical landscape, Jefferson believed, made the land suitable for unconstrained use by free settler-farmers, who would form the backbone of the republic. Written into the western landscape, the great American grid carries Jefferson's vision of free exploitation of the land into the present.
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