How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein

There are islands in the Hawaiian chain that are not part of the state (including Midway) even though islands to their east & west are part of Hawaii.The Great Lakes states had the borders modified and adjusted several times mostly to allow all the states to have a window on the lakes.The corner cut-off from Utah is due to a mountain range that makes a right angle at that point and thus would have made the valley it surrounds inaccessible from the rest of Utah.The easternmost counties of West Virginia actually wished to remain part of the Confederacy but they were occupied by Union troops and attached to the counties that seceded from Virginia.There’s a little piece of Delaware across the Delaware Bay attached to New Jersey!.New Hampshire gained land from Massachusetts because the king wanted to reward good Anglicans at the expense of the Puritans.Some of my favorite facts learned from this book:

The government also created tiers of states with equal height (North & South Dakota, Nebraska, & Kansas) or equal width (Washington, Oregon, North & South Dakota, Wyoming, & Colorado) that create some shared qualities even if there’s not equality of square mileage. The parrallel at 36☃0′, which originated in error as the border between Virginia and North Carolina spreads across many states as far west as the Texas panhandle because it become the barrier between slave & free states after the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Still the efforts of the government can be seen in the borders. That the rest of the states are not of equal size is due to a variety of factors: topographical borders that make more sense, confliciting land claims, land awarded to states for land lost to other states (seemingly an endless cycle), and sometimes just plain bad surveying that held up. The east coast states don’t count because they were laid out by kings and English charters. Some general observations show how the US government tried to create all states of equal size. How the States Got Their Shapes (2008) by Mark Stein is exactly what the title says it is: a state-by-state description of how the borders of the fifty states were laid out (even Hawaii, which is more complicated than it looks).

How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein