false 3 0 false false Wed Jan 07 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 19 12:42:32 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 19 12:49:00 -0800 2009
The book provided many little-known anecdotes and history lessons about the way our United States were formed. Based on what we read (not the entire book), it seemed to my wife and I that there were several things that impacted how a state's boundaries are formed: where resources lie (coal, forest, good soil, etc.), access to water and/or lakes, Congress's efforts to create states of roughly equal size, Britain's, and then the U.S.'s, relations with Spain and France before the creation of the U.S. as we know it today. Not surprisingly, slavery was a very important factor in the creation of many states, determining where north-south boundaries would lie to maximize the number of citizens, either pro- or anti-slavery, that resided within the state (e.g., Kansas, Missouri). More surprising was the role that incompetent surveyors, prideful politicians, and bribing landowners played in many of the quirky anecdotes (e.g., Idaho, Tennessee). I was also surprised to read that Georgia and North Carolina actually fought a war over a several-mile-wide strip of land along Georgia's north border. I also learned things about the shape of states that I had never known before. For example, there is a little bubble of Kentucky in the southern tip of Missouri created by a north-ward bend in the Mississippi. Delaware's northern end is a semi-circle.

This is a good book, but I would not recommend reading it cover to cover. My wife and I simply read about whatever state we were currently driving through, as we travelled to Kansas for Christmas, and then a few other states that we wanted to learn about, like states we have lived in, or states that simply seem wierd. By limiting the chapters we read in the book to those that we were actually interested in, I think we ended up enjoying the book more than we otherwise would have. ]]>