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50 Book Challenge: How the States Got Their Shapes

By "Milbarge" and "Fitz-Hume"

How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein (Amazon, B&N, Powell's). Okay, I'll admit it: I'm a geography nerd. When I was in junior high, I went to the state geography bee sponsored by National Geographic. I didn't get very far, and I was nowhere near the national finals with Alex Trebek. But I was nerdy enough to get my bona fides. So, as you can imagine, this book appealed to me.

How the States Got Their Shapes is exactly what the title promises. It has chapters for every state and the District of Columbia. Stein describes the compromises and controversies leading to the boundaries we see on the map today. Even a pretty obvious state like Hawaii gets a whole chapter (mostly on why certain islands in the vicinity are or aren't included in the state). The more oddly-shaped states get the full treatment, and soon you'll be able to explain why Connecticut has a panhandle and why Michigan has that non-contiguous Upper Peninsula. I was surprised to learn how many borders prompted skirmishes between settlers, and not just the famous Kansas-Missouri one. And you'll find out how just how often crooked borders are the result of nothing more significant than bad surveying (hint: very).

Stein had me hooked with his introductory chapter entitled "DON'T SKIP THIS." And it's good advice. That chapter discusses the big boundary events in American history -- the Treaty of Paris, the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, the Missouri Compromise, etc. When the U.S. acquired new territory, it had to decide how to carve it into states. Stein makes a good case that, very often, those designs were based on commendable Congressional foresight. There's a reason state pairs like Alabama/Mississippi and Arizona/New Mexico are so similar in size (not to mention North and South Dakota). Despite, or maybe because, the original colonies were so dissimilar in size, thanks to royal grants, religious exclusion, and political power, Congress made a concerted effort to give equal size to new states, to the extent possible. Exceptions like Texas and California are truly exceptions. It's pretty remarkable how successful legislators were in their efforts -- as demonstrated by the number of western states that are precisely seven degrees of longitude wide or three or four degrees of latitude high.

That reliance on longitude and latitude is understandable, given the available technology. But it makes me wonder what the states would look like if they were being drawn up from scratch in the modern age. I suppose they would look like our gerrymandered election districts. Faced with that gruesome image, I'm just fine with those boring square states we have.

This book could have been written very differently, with lots of discussion of various Congressional hearings or the efforts by many states to grab a little more land. Stein provides a bibliography, so I suppose that kind of information is out there if you want to track it down. I do wish there had been some kind of index or timeline so one could read the book chronologically, but Stein also provides many cross-references in the individual chapters, so you can peek ahead to Wisconsin while you're reading about Minnesota. But the essentially random nature of the alphabetical approach suits the reader who wants to jump around.

Stein's book is a fun read for grown-up geography nerds like me, and also accessible enough for the junior high class trying to pick a winner of the school geography bee. Chock full of facts, highly interesting, certainly recommended for anyone who ever looked at a map and wondered, indeed, How the States Got Their Shapes.

(Previous 50 Book Challenge reviews)

Full post as published by Begging the Question on July 20, 2008 (boomark / email).