m&d, historically

[Domine Vobiscuits]

(Lorentzen / Nicklaus) wrote:
>  what's the best and/or newest historical article on the mason & dixon 
>line?
>


It depends on what you're looking for...

The recent general articles on the Line are all a little incestuous.  Most 
of them appeared around the mid-twentieth century (near the line's 
bi-centennial).  Almost every recent work that you pick up on the line will 
draw heavily from the articles by Thomas D. Cope.  We wrote around twenty 
articles on M&D and the Line between the 1940s and the 1960s (a few were 
co-authored by H.W. Robinson).  Cope is considered by most Line historians 
as THE M&D historian, and there are a number of places in P's novel that 
Cope's articles appear the be the source.  Although there are a couple of 
articles in which he gives a history of the Line, he tends to focus on more 
specific elements/threads of the survey.  He also, along with Robinson, 
provides the most complete biographical information on M&D that I have 
encountered (Robinson was the librarian at the Royal Society and did a large 
search through their records, papers, &c.)

If you would like one work that provides a history of the Line survey, the 
transit observations, and Mason's work in Perthshire and on Mayer's Luna 
Tables, &c., you might try to find *The Mason and Dixon Line: Story for a 
Bicentenary* by Hubertis M. Cummings.

Mason's Journal is also useful, and is usually available at www.mxbf.com.  
Mason and Dixon also have a few articles published in Philosophical 
transactions for 1762, 1768, 1769, and 1770.

John LaTrobe presented a history of the Line in 1854.  While it remains 
generally focused on historical record, there are moments were LaTrobe 
attempts to fill gaps through speculation (e.g., he attempts to provide a 
description of the personalities of M&D through an analysis of their 
signatures).

There is also an article on the line--focusing more on the boundary 
dispute--in the Report on the Resurvey of the Maryland-Pennsylvania 
Boundary.

In spite of a few errors, Mark John Skertich's M.A. thesis, "'This Palpable 
Disregard of the Plain Provisions of Nature:' The Role of the Royal Society 
in the Mason-Dixon Survey", is worth a look if you can get your hands on it.

James Veech's *The Monongahela of Old; or Historical Sketches of 
South-Western Pennsylvania to the Year 1800* contains a rather famous 
chapter on the Line.

There are quite a few others, but I think these are probably your best bets. 
  I actually have an annotated bibliography on the source texts for 
researching M&D, but I think it's probably a little too big to send to the 
list...

Keith W

________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com