American cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 7 learning regions, matching the rounds on the United States guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 17 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

New York

New York has about 8.3 million people in the city and some 20 million in the wider region, making it the largest city in the country by a factor of two. The Dutch bought the island of Manhattan in 1626 and called the place New Amsterdam; the English took it in 1664 and renamed it for the Duke of York.

Chicago

Chicago sits where the Great Lakes come closest to the Mississippi basin, which is why every railroad west ran through it. The fire of 1871 burned about nine square kilometers of the center, and the rebuilding produced the first steel-framed skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building of 1885. The Chicago River was reversed in 1900 to stop the city’s sewage running into its own water supply.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles has around 3.8 million people and is the second largest city in the country. It sits in a basin ringed by mountains that traps its own air, which is why the word smog attached itself here in the 1940s. Its water comes from 375 kilometers away up the Owens Valley aqueduct, opened in 1913, which drained the valley it took it from.

New Orleans

New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718 on the highest ground in the delta, which is still mostly below sea level; about half the city sits under it and is kept dry by levees and pumps. Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed those defenses in August 2005 and flooded around 80 percent of the city.

Denver

Denver sits at almost exactly 1,609 meters, one mile, which is what the nickname is about and why a step on the Colorado State Capitol is marked as the line. The thin air is worth about ten percent on the flight of a baseball, so its ballpark gives up more home runs than any other in the league.

Seattle

Seattle grew as the outfitting port for the Klondike gold rush of 1897, when prospectors bound for the Yukon bought a year of supplies here before sailing north. It later became the home of Boeing, founded in 1916, and of Microsoft and Amazon, and it is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest.

Miami

Miami is the only major American city founded by a woman: Julia Tuttle persuaded Henry Flagler to extend his railroad south in 1896, and the settlement incorporated that year with just over 300 residents. More than two thirds of the population now speaks Spanish at home, a shift that began with the Cuban exodus after 1959.

Honolulu

Honolulu is on Oʻahu, the third largest of the Hawaiian islands but the one with most of the people. Pearl Harbor, a few kilometers west of the city, was attacked by Japanese carrier aircraft on 7 December 1941, which brought the United States into the Second World War. The name means sheltered bay.

Juneau

Juneau is the capital of Alaska and cannot be reached by road: it is hemmed in by an icefield behind and water in front, so everyone arrives by boat or plane. It became the capital in 1906, when the seat of government moved from Sitka after gold was found here in 1880.

Salt Lake City

Brigham Young led about 1,600 Mormon settlers here in 1847 to a valley nobody else wanted, which was the point after the violence they had left in Illinois. The city was laid out on a grid of ten-acre blocks with streets wide enough to turn a wagon team, which is why the downtown blocks are still unusually large.

Detroit

Detroit is the only major American city from which you look south into Canada, across the river to Windsor. Henry Ford started the moving assembly line at Highland Park in 1913 and cut the build time of a Model T from twelve hours to about ninety minutes. The city peaked at 1.85 million people in 1950 and has under 640,000 now.

San Francisco

San Francisco went from about 1,000 residents to 25,000 in the single year of 1849, when gold was found in the hills inland. The earthquake and fire of April 1906 destroyed roughly 80 percent of the city. It is 121 square kilometers, small enough that the density is second only to New York among large American cities.

Washington, D.C.

The site was chosen in 1790 as a compromise: the southern states got the capital on the Potomac, and in exchange the federal government took on the war debts of the states, which the north wanted. Pierre Charles L’Enfant laid out the diagonal avenues over a grid, and a height limit dating from 1910 is why the city has no skyscrapers.

St. Louis

St. Louis was the jumping-off point for the west: Lewis and Clark set out from just upstream in 1804, and for most of the century after, wagon trains outfitted here. The Gateway Arch, finished in 1965, is 192 meters tall and is the tallest monument in the country.

Pierre

Pierre has about 14,000 people and is the second smallest state capital in the country, after Montpelier. It is on the map here because a population cut that takes in Chicago and Houston leaves eleven states with no dot at all, and a state you cannot be asked about is a hole in the map.

El Paso

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez across the river form one of the largest binational metropolitan areas in the world, with around 2.5 million people between them. The pass the name refers to is the gap the Rio Grande cuts between two mountain ranges, which every road and railway through this stretch of the border still uses.

Boston

Boston was founded in 1630 and is one of the oldest cities in the country. Much of what it stands on was made: the Back Bay was tidal mudflat until gravel trains filled it in between 1857 and 1900, adding about 240 hectares to a peninsula that had been nearly an island.

How this one works

The other maps of the United States

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the United States atlas page, the country itself on the United States guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.