How the States Got Their Shapes

Author: Mark Stein
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061431389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book 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.

American Panic

Author: Mark Stein
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1137279028
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
What political panics—from the Salem Witch Trials to the Tea Party—can tell us about our modern society

50 States

Author: Erin McHugh
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Pub
ISBN: 1579128513
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Kid characters guide readers through the states, pointing out the capital, historic landmarks, famous residents, geographical and natural wonders, local delicacies and interesting facts, in a title which includes a fold-out jigsaw puzzle and a 50-state quarter collector map.

The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA

Author: Doug Mack
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393247619
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
“To truly understand the United States, one must understand The Not-Quite States of America.” —Mark Stein, best-selling author of How the States Got Their Shapes Everyone knows that America is 50 states and… some other stuff. The U.S. territories—American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—and their 4 million people are little known and often forgotten, so Doug Mack set out on a 30,000-mile journey to learn about them. How did they come to be part of the United States? What are they like today? And why aren’t they states? Deeply researched and richly reported, The Not-Quite States of America is an entertaining and unprecedented account of the territories’ crucial yet overlooked place in the American story.

Creating the American West

Author: Derek R. Everett
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806146141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
Boundaries—lines imposed on the landscape—shape our lives, dictating everything from which candidates we vote for to what schools our children attend to the communities with which we identify. In Creating the American West, historian Derek R. Everett examines the function of these internal lines in American history generally and in the West in particular. Drawing lines to create states in the trans-Mississippi West, he points out, imposed a specific form of political organization that made the West truly American. Everett examines how settlers lobbied for boundaries and how politicians imposed them. He examines the origins of boundary-making in the United States from the colonial era through the Louisiana Purchase. Case studies then explore the ethnic, sectional, political, and economic angles of boundaries. Everett first examines the boundaries between Arkansas and its neighboring Native cultures, and the pseudo war between Missouri and Iowa. He then traces the lines splitting the Oregon Country and the states of California and Nevada, and considers the ethnic and political consequences of the boundary between New Mexico and Colorado. He explains the evolution of the line splitting the Dakotas, and concludes with a discussion of ways in which state boundaries can contribute toward new interpretations of borderlands history. A major theme in the history of state boundaries is the question of whether to use geometric or geographic lines—in other words, lines corresponding to parallels and meridians or those fashioned by natural features. With the distribution of western land, Everett shows, geography gave way to geometry and transformed the West. The end of boundary-making in the late nineteenth century is not the end of the story, however. These lines continue to complicate a host of issues including water rights, taxes, political representation, and immigration. Creating the American West shows how the past continues to shape the present.

Lost States

Author: Michael J. Trinklein
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594747520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description
This is American history they don’t teach you in class: Discover the “fascinating, funny” stories of the states that never were, from Texlahoma to West Florida (The New Yorker) Everyone knows the fifty nifty united states—but what about the hundreds of other statehood proposals that never came to pass? Lost States is a tribute to such great unrealized dreams as West Florida, Texlahoma, Montezuma, Rough and Ready, and Yazoo. Some of these states came remarkably close to joining the Union. Others never had a chance. Many are still trying. Consider: Frontier legend Daniel Boone once proposed a state of Transylvania in the Appalachian wilderness. His plan was resurrected a few years later with the new name of Kentucky. Residents of bucolic South Jersey wanted to secede from their urban north Jersey neighbors and form the fifty-first state. The Gold Rush territory of Nataqua could have made a fine state—but since no women were willing to live there, the settlers gave up and joined California. Each story offers a fascinating glimpse at the nation we might have become—along with plenty of absurd characters, bureaucratic red tape, and political gamesmanship. Accompanying these tales are beautifully rendered maps detailing the proposed state boundaries, plus images of real-life artifacts and ephemera. Welcome to the world of Lost States!

Albion's Seed

Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019974369X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 981

Book Description
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Innocent Experiments

Author: Rebecca Onion
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629488
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
From the 1950s to the digital age, Americans have pushed their children to live science-minded lives, cementing scientific discovery and youthful curiosity as inseparable ideals. In this multifaceted work, historian Rebecca Onion examines the rise of informal children's science education in the twentieth century, from the proliferation of home chemistry sets after World War I to the century-long boom in child-centered science museums. Onion looks at how the United States has increasingly focused its energies over the last century into producing young scientists outside of the classroom. She shows that although Americans profess to believe that success in the sciences is synonymous with good citizenship, this idea is deeply complicated in an era when scientific data is hotly contested and many Americans have a conflicted view of science itself. These contradictions, Onion explains, can be understood by examining the histories of popular science and the development of ideas about American childhood. She shows how the idealized concept of "science" has moved through the public consciousness and how the drive to make child scientists has deeply influenced American culture.

Homewaters

Author: David B. Williams
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters dense with nutrient-rich foods, with cultures intertwined through exchanges across the waterways. Transformed by settlement and resource extraction, Puget Sound and its future health now depend on a better understanding of the region’s ecological complexities. Focusing on the area south of Port Townsend and between the Cascade and Olympic mountains, Williams uncovers human and natural histories in, on, and around the Sound. In conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, Williams traces how generations of humans have interacted with such species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish, and herring. He sheds light on how warfare shaped development and how people have moved across this maritime highway, in canoes, the mosquito fleet, and today’s ferry system. The book also takes an unflinching look at how the Sound’s ecosystems have suffered from human behavior, including pollution, habitat destruction, and the effects of climate change. Witty, graceful, and deeply informed, Homewaters weaves history and science into a fascinating and hopeful narrative, one that will introduce newcomers to the astonishing life that inhabits the Sound and offers longtime residents new insight into and appreciation of the waters they call home. A Michael J. Repass Book

Ralph Ellison

Author: Arnold Rampersad
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375707980
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 706

Book Description
Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage. Starting with Ellison’s hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subject’s troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.This book is both the definitive biography of Ellison and a stellar model of literary biography.