“Restless Progress in America”: Drawing the Mason-Dixon Line

“When I found I had crossed that line,” recalled Harriet Tubman, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything . . . I felt like I was in Heaven.” Such was the power of the Mason-Dixon Line. Within 75 years of its completion to resolve an eight-decade-long dispute between two colonial proprietors, a boundary line drawn in the 1760s by two English...
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Minutes of the Provincial Council, 1727

The name of Madame Montour first appears in the Minutes of the Provincial Council on July 3, 1727, when she served as the interpreter for Deputy Governor Patrick Gordon, in office from 1726 to 1736, who met with various chiefs of the Cayuga, Conestoga, and Conoy tribes assembled at Philadelphia. The Cayuga had requested the meeting with Gordon on behalf of the Five Nations of the Iroquois...
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