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 enlarge | Author: Mark Stein
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $12.80
You Save: $10.15 (44%)
New (39) Used (12) from $12.50
Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 535
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0061431389
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.3
EAN: 9780061431388
ASIN: 0061431389
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081130225628T
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| Customer Reviews:
 how the states got their shapes September 16, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a splendid book shipped promptly and well-packaged. I have bought four copies now. One for me and three for gifts. A good read for young and old.[ASIN:0061431389 How the States Got Their Shapes]]
 Some helpful information, but woefully incomplete September 10, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
There is a lot of useful information in this slim volume, but the omissions I know about without so much as cracking open a book indicate to me that the author didn't really do enough research to justify his grandiose title.
I enjoyed learning such things as how a small valley was transferred from Massachusetts to New York hundreds of years after their borders were presumably set. Indeed, I wondered why Arizona didn't seek to cede the isolated and ungovernable Colorado City, home of alleged polygamists, to Utah on the same basis. It was also interesting to learn about how some lines were mis-surveyed, though Stein could have gone into further depth as to why in some cases courts would allow this to continue.
Given that nearly every school child knows about the Mason-Dixon line, it would have seemed natural for Stein to cover their work in far more detail than he did.
But what really bugged me is that he totally missed a number of interesting issues relating to borders. For example, there was an arbitration between the U.S. and Canada over the border between Alaska and British Columbia in the panhandle region. This makes for interesting history, the idea that our border was subject to a vote of six people, three from each country. Stein doesn't mention it at all. There was a war called the Pig War, commemorated by a National Historic Site, over British and American claims to the San Juan and Gulf Islands off Washington. And why does the border, which follows the 49th parallel even to include a tiny, noncontiguous area called Point Roberts, suddenly head southward so that Vancouver Island isn't split between the U.S. and Canada? Not a word from Stein. Finally, Isle Royale, the largest island in Lake Superior, is (a) in the United States, not Canada; and (b) in Michigan, not Minnesota, to which it is far closer. Why? Not a word from Stein.
If these things, all of at least as much interest as the questions Stein does ask in his book, are not covered, what others of which I am unaware are not covered as well?
this is NOT the first book on this subject September 8, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Our library just got this book in, and it bothers me that the promotion of this book includes the falsehood that this is the first book to tackle how the states got their shapes... Just nine years ago, there was the book The Shape of the Nation-Why the States are Shaped Like That by Jim Feldman, which is arguably a better book and with better resources/references/footnotes. You might like to poke around a bit to see what else is out there (such as Mr. Feldman's book) before you invest the money and reading-time in this book.
Interesting perspective on the geographic layout of America September 7, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Fascinating how even the earliest states had a bearing on the borders of those in the middle and western portions of the US.
Borders all over the map September 1, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I live in the panhandle of Connecticut and have always been fascinated about the vast irregularity of the borders of most of the United States. Author Mark Stein's informative new book, "How the States Got Their Shapes" is a quick report as to how each state's boundaries came into play...and there are dozens of different reasons why.
Two things stand out in Stein's book...the shaping of many of the eastern states (due to charters by England's Charles I and II) and the western ones by Congress (in an attempt to make states of equal a size as possible). In between these two devices all chaos ensues. It's one thing to have a river act as a natural boundary but if one looks at a map of the United States, rivers come and go supplanted by straight lines which don't always follow parallels or meridians. There are stories of bad surveying, compromises about gold mines and Indians, lines made anew to give certain states more access to lakes and to keep certain cities within some borders, interstate negotiations and the inevitable wars that helped to redraw the boundaries.
Stein's book would have been better organized by region than by state capitalization (there are continuous references to flip back or forward when better arrangements could have been made) and there are dates that are simply wrong or misleading... (Texas became a state in 1845, not 1846 and the Hoover Dam is listed as being created in 1935 AND 1936). But with the introduction of each state, Stein asks the reader to ponder questions about why that particular entity looks the way it does and that is, in itself, a nice historical challenge.
"How the States Got Their Shapes" is a good, if not a great or deep attempt to answer these questions but it does provide many facts we never learned in school. I recommend it for that reason.
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