The 42nd parallel of north latitude is an imaginary line running along the surface of the Northern hemisphere of the Earth .
The 42nd parallel played an important role in bordering the American West : the Adams-Onis Treaty used the 42nd parallel as the northern border of Spanish California ; beyond the territory between the 42nd parallel and the line 54 ° 40 'north latitude, a geopolitical struggle unfolded between Great Britain and the USA at the beginning of the XIX century [1] . Under the Guadalupe-Hidalgo agreement, in 1848 the northern part of Maksiki went to the United States, as a result of the newly formed US states ( California , Nevada , Utah ) received the server border, which passed along the 42nd parallel, which became the southern border of Oregon and Idaho .
In the eastern US, the 42nd parallel served as the border between Pennsylvania and New York , apparently due to an erroneous interpretation of the charter issued by W. Penn (it referred to the territory "from the beginning of the 40th degree to the beginning of the 43rd degree" that Penn interpreted as the space between the 39th parallel and the 42nd). Partial success in the south (although the Calverts had a different understanding of geography, after negotiations the border passed near the 39 ° 44 'north latitude line) led to an unsuccessful attempt to expand north. In the end, part of the modern border between the Delaware River and Lake Erie passed along the 42nd parallel [2] .
In Culture
Dos Passos describes the 42nd parallel in the novel of the same name from the trilogy “ USA ” as a line along which hurricanes are allegedly spreading across the USA (the epigraph quoting the book “American Climatology” on this subject was apparently invented by Dos Passos himself) [3 ] .
Notes
- ↑ Ray Allen Billington, Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier . UNM Press, 2001.S. 151
- ↑ Gary Alden Smith. State and National Boundaries of the United States . McFarland, 2011.S. 51 .
- ↑ Montage in the literature of the 1930s // Ilya Kukulin. Machines of a noisy time: how Soviet installation became a method of unofficial culture. New Literary Review, 2015.S. 229.