How the States Got Their Shapes

Collins, 2008, Hardcover

Product Description

Why does Oklahoma have that panhandle? Did someone make a mistake?

We are so familiar with the map of the United States that our state borders seem as much a part of nature as mountains and rivers. Even the oddities—the entire state of Maryland(!)—have become so engrained that our map might as well be a giant jigsaw puzzle designed by Divine Providence. But that's where the real mystery begins. Every edge of the familiar wooden jigsaw pieces of our childhood represents a revealing moment of history and of, well, humans drawing lines in the sand.

How the States Got Their Shapes is the first book to tackle why our state lines are where they are. Here are the stories behind the stories, right down to the tiny northward jog at the eastern end of Tennessee and the teeny-tiny (and little known) parts of Delaware that are not attached to Delaware but to New Jersey.

How the States Got Their Shapes examines:

Why West Virginia has a finger creeping up the side of Pennsylvania
Why Michigan has an upper peninsula that isn't attached to Michigan
Why some Hawaiian islands are not Hawaii
Why Texas and California are so outsized, especially when so many Midwestern states are nearly identical in size

Packed with fun oddities and trivia, this entertaining guide also reveals the major fault lines of American history, from ideological intrigues and religious intolerance to major territorial acquisitions. Adding the fresh lens of local geographic disputes, military skirmishes, and land grabs, Mark Stein shows how the seemingly haphazard puzzle pieces of our nation fit together perfectly.

Product Details

Title: How the States Got Their Shapes
Sales Rank: 833 in Books
Author: Mark Stein
Publisher: Collins, 2008-06-01, Hardcover, 352 pages, ISBN: 0061431389
Package Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches, 1.1 pounds

Customer Reviews

How the States Got Their Shapes: This is a very interesting book if you are interested in American or Local history. There are good stories behind why states have such different borders. Good for school children, goes beyond what they learn in public school. More reviews

A Short History of Every Boundary in the U.S.: This work has the rare ability to pull you in to the minutiae of boundary agreements, disagreements, and just plain mistakes that characterize the present lines of all 50 states. I did not know that the little jog Virginia takes at the Tennessee border was the result of a mistake by a surveyor, or that Wisconsin and Michigan, to this day, dispute the ownership… More reviews

how the states got their shapes: This is a splendid book shipped promptly and well-packaged. I have bought four copies now. One for me and three for gifts. A good read for young and old.[ASIN:0061431389 How the States Got Their Shapes]] More reviews

Some helpful information, but woefully incomplete: There is a lot of useful information in this slim volume, but the omissions I know about without so much as cracking open a book indicate to me that the author didn't really do enough research to justify his grandiose title.
I enjoyed learning such things as how a small valley was transferred from Massachusetts to New York hundreds of years after their borders were… More reviews

this is NOT the first book on this subject: Our library just got this book in, and it bothers me that the promotion of this book includes the falsehood that this is the first book to tackle how the states got their shapes... Just nine years ago, there was the book The Shape of the Nation-Why the States are Shaped Like That by Jim Feldman, which… More reviews