The Master Builders: Structures of Empire in the New World: Spanish Initiatives and United States Invention

320 pages, illustrations, maps; 24 cm. Tight, clean copy. Dust jacket protected in a mylar cover. *** CONTENTS: PART I: SPAIN'S COMPRESSION STRUCTURE; 1. The Spanish Initiative; 2. Preparation for Empire: Early Construction Work on the Peninsula; The Medieval Builders; 3. Building the Castilian Compression Structure; Strengthening the Structure; New Institutional Tie-Beams; Final Testing; 4. Laying Out the First Site-Lines in the New World; Initial Reconnaissance: Spain's Discovery of the West Atlantic and the Caribbean, 1492; 1519; 5. Design Enlargement; The Need for Increased Compression; The Implications of "Scaling Up"; 6. Extending the Ground-Plan of Empire; Continental Expansion: The Land and the Rivers, 1519; 1543; The Problems of Coordinating the Ground-Plan; 7. Spain Crosses the Pacific: Delimiting the Western Perimeter of Empire; The Insertion of a New Tie-Beam; 8. Oceans Apart: Spain's Search for Certainty in the New World; Weight and Mass; Prestressing; Beams and Cantilevers; Joints; Resilience and Fracture; Spain's "Reduced Risk" Construction Policies: Administration, Church, Town, Immigration, Trade, Overland Transport; Its enduring perception as "interoceanic" travel; 9. The Survival of Empire; New Survey Work and New Construction; PART II: THE UNITED STATES' TENSION STRUCTURE; 10. The English Initiative; Laying Out the First Site-Lines and Starting Construction; 11. The Failure of the First Tension Structure; 12. A Newly Designed Tension Structure: The Invention of Federalism; Utility; Economy; Expansion; 13. Spain's Influence on the Early U.S. Perimeter Ground-Plan: Part I; The Mississippi "Coast"; 14. Spain's Influence on the Early U.S. Perimeter Ground-Plan: Part II; The Development of Transoceanic Empire; New England Enters the Pacific; 15. The First Phase of Land Empire; Spanning the Interior: The Problems of Diverging Styles of Construction, 1800-1860; New Bridging and Trussing Skills Strengthen the North and West; Pseudo-Tension and Greater Compression Weaken the Deep South; Echoes of Imperial Spain; 16. The Extension of Land Empire in the Trans-Mississippi West; Structural Engineering After the Civil War; Strengthening the Foundations, Supports, Spans and Surfaces; The Structural Significance of the Work "Transcontinental"; 17. After word and Conclusion; Design and Construction in the New World; Contrasts in Interpretation: Responses to Risk; Contrast on the Peripheries of Empire; Cross-bracing; Maintaining and Strengthening the United States' Tension Structure: Structural Analysis; Tension Structure: Structural Analysis; Critical Load; Americanization; The Language Component. Size: 8vo.…