This edition contains a limited number of illustrations.Due to the level of detail, maps are best viewed on a tablet.The epic story of how the gigantic land of America acquired its unique shape across 3000 miles of territory, and how the largest land survey in history paved the way both for a colossal sale of property and for the embedding of democracy and the spirit of independence in the psyche of Americans.The sheer scale of it makes the measuring of America extr...

Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history as a result of the most creative – and, at the same time, destructive – cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land.This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entir...

'A beautifully written portrait of an overlooked prime minister and a fascinating account of his assassination during the Napoleonic Wars**'** ANTONY BEEVOR, author of StalingradFour American presidents have been assassinated, but in its much longer history, only one British prime minister. This is the untold story of that killing and its enormous repercussions.On 11 May 1812 Spencer Perceval, the British Prime Minister, was fatall...

For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband’s encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary as she was. After months of painstaking investigation, he was finally able to crack the code, and in the process uncover the ending to an extraordinary World War II romance.Pamela fell in love with RAF pilot Donald Hill in the summer of 1939, just a fe...

Using the same blend of narrative and rhetorical brilliance that made his critically acclaimed debut history so successful, Andro Linklater begins with premier U.S. surveyor Andrew Ellicott calculating the Pennsylvania-Virginia border in 1784- using telescope, chronograph, and astronomical tables. As pioneers move westward, Ellicott and his kind create property which hastens the formation of stabilizing government.