The Mason-Dixon Line survey is officially completed. The historic border survey was undertaken by surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon between 1763 and 1767 to resolve a land dispute between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland and Delaware. This line also became a symbolic boundary between the Northern and Southern states in the era before the American Civil War.
The term also refers to the line established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which extended the division westward into new territories and is the title of a 1997 postmodern novel by Thomas Pynchon that re-imagines their story.
