Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation

Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation

Gray, Edward G.

Paperback

19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesRegional: Middle Atlantic

Publisher Price: $26.95

ISBN10: 0674301536
ISBN13: 9780674301535
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: Oct 7 2025
Pages: 456
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.50 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.10
Language: English

Deeply researched and highly readable. --Eric Foner, Times Literary Supplement

A rich history of regional distinctions, especially as they shaped the antebellum Republic. --Kirkus Reviews

A fitting testament to a career marked by boundary-crossing curiosity and stalwart service to the historical profession...[a] splendid new history. --Richard Bell, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Fascinating...does justice to the full sweep and complexity of American history by expertly tracing a century of change across one especially revealing patch of ground. --James H. Read, American Political Thought

Erudite, gripping, and highly significant. Gray puts his talents as a historian of the American Revolution and the early republic to excellent use, persuasively arguing that the Mason-Dixon Line is worth seeing as a geopolitical border. --Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost

Acclaimed scholar Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive history of the Mason-Dixon Line, a border at the center of early American political contestation. Formalized in 1767 to fully and finally demarcate Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, the Line resolved a longstanding jurisdictional conflict that had provoked bloodshed among colonists and ensnared Lenape and Susquehannock populations. In 1780, Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated a new phase, as the Line became a boundary between free and slave states and their distinct legal regimes. Then, with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Line became a federal instrument to arrest freedom-seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line's significance fade, though it haunted the geography of Jim Crow.

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--all contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that transformed American history.

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