I love my country, and am grateful to live here, but wouldn´t the U.S. be even more interesting if we had states called Chippewa and Nickajack? And if the Yucatan Peninsula had joined the union?

Our Dewey Decimal journey brings us to the 900′s, the realm of history & geography. We´re including geographical developments that never came to be.

Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made It by Michael J. Trinklein

The author tells the stories of geographical bodies that we didn’t manage to absorb as states, such as England, Wales, Ireland & Scotland. He also lets us know about parts of the country, such as Long Island and Washington, D. C., that have sometimes wanted to become states on their own.

And our country might have been chopped up in many different ways. Leafing through this book, I count eight variations on the Dakotas. Mr. Trinklein drew his own maps, and they’re a delight. 

He never says that our state boundaries as they exist are ideal (Idaho makes no sense, he tells us. I speak from experience, having lived in the state for twenty years.), but he’s full of funny info about suggested alternatives.

Trinklein is also involved with a Lost States blog. Parts of the book are reproduced there, but added features include links–to an article, for example, about Presidential candidate Rick Perry’s claim that Texas could secede from the Union. (Perry wasn’t pushing the idea.) 

As for Indiana: If the Presbyterian state of Hazard had really been created, we would have been swallowed whole. If Thomas Jefferson’s outline had been followed, we would have been diced into parts of Metropotamia, Assenisipia, Saratoga, and a different kind of Illinois. I’m good the way things are.

And in case you’ve wondered where the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana, from the TV show “Parks and Recreation,” is really located, the Lost States blog has worked that one out.

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