$PDF$/READ Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation

2. Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation &#8220Amagisterial yet highly nuanced account that ventures back and forth across Mason and Dixon&#8217sfabled demarcation line as audaciously as 18th-century raiding parties once did.&#8221#8213Harold Holzer, Wall Street JournalThe first comprehensive history of the Mason-Dixon Line&#8213adramatic story of imperial rivalry and settler- colonial violence, the bonds of slavery and the fight for freedom.The United States is the product of border dynamics&#8213no just at international frontiers but at the boundary that runs through its first heartland. The story of the Mason-Dixon Line is the story of America&#8217scolonial beginnings, nation building, and conflict over slavery.Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America&#8217sdefining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. Rivalry with the Calverts of Maryland&#8213coplicated by struggles with Dutch settlers in Delaware, breakneck agricultural development, and the resistance of Lenape and Susquehannock natives&#8213ha led to contentious jurisdictional ambiguity, full-scale battles among the colonists, and ethnic slaughter. In 1780, Pennsylvania&#8217sAct for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line&#8217shistory. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland&#8211Pensylvania borderlands, but now African Americans&#8213enlaved and free&#8213faed a boundary between distinct legal regimes. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Mason-Dixon Line became a federal instrument to arrest the northward flow of freedom-

3. seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line&#8217ssignificance fade, though it continued to haunt African Americans as Jim Crow took hold.Mason-Dixon tells the gripping story of colonial grandees, Native American diplomats, Quaker abolitionists, fugitives from slavery, capitalist railroad and canal builders, US presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Underground Railroad conductors&#8213al contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that was a transformative force in American history.

4. Bestselling new book releases Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation

5. COPY LINK DOWNLOAD TO GET ABOOK Link in description