Having said that, Mark Stein’s How the States Got Their Shapes was one of the most fun books I’ve read all year.

Stein devotes five or six pages to each of the fifty states in alphabetical order, telling the surprisingly fascinating story of how each of their boundaries was negotiated, surveyed, and finally accepted.  Each chapter is supplemented by clearly drawn maps that illustrate exactly what controversies and challenges faced the bureaucrats who attempted to build rational boundaries between contentious, occasionally warring territories.

Each chapter starts with a series of questions the author will tackle, such as this example for Alaska:  “How come Alaska slips out beneath its straight-line eastern border with Canada?  In fact, why isn’t Alaska just a continuation of Canada?  Were the Canadians suckered?  Or did we threaten them?  And why is Alaska’s straight line border where it is?” 

The book really functions as an alternative way to look at American history, and the author finds several recurring themes in the shaping of the fifty states.  Most prominent is a Jeffersonian insistence on the equality of states’ sizes whenever possible, which resulted in chunks being taken out of corners of states and crooked lines being drawn where a straight line would seem far more obvious.  Interesting exceptions to the attempts to equalize the states are found in California and Texas, and Stein explains the different ways each convinced the U.S. government to accept its unusually massive boundaries.

Another recurring theme is the influence of slavery on the shapes of many states.  Oklahoma’s own panhandle is a fascinating example of this, as Texas was Constitutionally prevented from retaining any land north of its current panhandle border without violating the mandated dividing line between slave and free states.  Stein notes, “Congress was trying to turn its eyes away from the fundamental inequality of slavery (by giving the choice to the states) and fix its gaze on an idealized (indeed, mathematical) vision of equality among the newly forming western states.  All this is preserved in the borders of Oklahoma’s panhandle, in one-half of one degree of latitude.”

Beyond the pressing issues of slavery and power politics, other surprising factors influenced the lines that now seem so established on our landscape as to be almost literally carved in stone or earth.  Religious communities influenced the borders of Delaware and New Hampshire, issues of language dictated the boundaries of Louisiana and New Mexico, and the patchwork border of Kentucky and Tennessee was pieced together with the significant assistance of local moonshining operations.

Stein invests these map-making stories with unexpected drama and intrigue, revealing many obscure tales that account for state boundaries’ massive but often overlooked influence on American life to this day.  His conclusion to the story of New Mexico’s borders is an excellent example of the book’s themes:  They may “look pretty square, but in fact they preserve stories of fears and compassion, of shrewd political savvy, and of objective planning for the future.  In a sense, New Mexico’s borders contain a kind of mural of what goes on in the halls of Congress.”