American states, 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.

Alaska

Alaska is about 1.7 million square kilometers, more than twice the size of Texas and larger than all but eighteen countries. The United States bought it from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, around two cents an acre, in a deal the press of the day called Seward’s Folly after the secretary of state who signed it. Gold on the Klondike thirty years later ended that argument.

Texas

Texas covers about 695,000 square kilometers and is second only to Alaska. It spent nine years as a country of its own: the Republic of Texas broke from Mexico in 1836 and joined the United States in 1845, which is why the state flag is a national flag and why it flies at the same height as the American one rather than below it.

California

California has close to 39 million people, more than any other state and more than Canada. It joined the union in 1850, straight to statehood and without a territorial period, because the gold rush of the year before had filled it faster than the usual process could keep up with. Measured on its own its economy is among the largest in the world.

Florida

Florida runs about 800 kilometers from the Georgia line to Key West and is nowhere more than a hundred meters above the sea; its highest point is 105 meters, the lowest high point of any state. Spain held it until 1821 and the Spanish name, meaning flowery, is from Easter 1513, when Juan Ponce de León made the first recorded European landing.

Michigan

The two halves are joined only by the Mackinac Bridge, which opened in 1957 and is eight kilometers long. The Upper Peninsula was handed to Michigan in 1836 as compensation for losing the strip of land around Toledo to Ohio, a swap that looked like a bad one until copper and iron were found up there.

Hawaii

Hawaii is the only state outside North America and the only one made entirely of islands. It was an independent kingdom until an American-backed coup deposed Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893; annexation followed in 1898 and statehood not until 1959, the last state admitted. Its volcanoes are still building it: Kīlauea has erupted repeatedly through the last four decades.

Colorado

Colorado and Wyoming are the only states whose borders are drawn entirely on lines of latitude and longitude. Colorado has the highest mean elevation of any state, about 2,070 meters, and more than fifty peaks above 4,267 meters. The eastern third of it is flat plain, which surprises people who arrive expecting mountains everywhere.

Wyoming

Wyoming has fewer people than any other state, under 600,000, which is fewer than the city of Denver next door. It gave women the vote in 1869 as a territory, half a century before the country did, partly out of principle and partly to attract settlers to a place with six men for every woman. Yellowstone, the first national park anywhere, takes up its northwestern corner.

Louisiana

Louisiana is the only state whose law descends from the French and Spanish civil codes rather than English common law, and the only one divided into parishes rather than counties. The United States bought it, and 2 million square kilometers behind it, from Napoleon in 1803 for about $15 million, which roughly doubled the size of the country overnight.

New York

The Erie Canal, finished in 1825, ran 584 kilometers from the Hudson to Lake Erie across exactly that stretch, and it is the reason New York City rather than Philadelphia or New Orleans became the port of the continent. Freight that had taken weeks by wagon took days by barge, at a twentieth of the cost.

Washington

The Cascade Range splits the state in two: the western side gets over 2,000 millimeters of rain a year and the eastern side is dry enough to need irrigation. Mount St. Helens, in the southwest of it, lost 400 meters of its summit in the eruption of May 1980, the deadliest in American history.

Minnesota

That notch is the Northwest Angle, the only part of the mainland United States north of the 49th parallel, and it exists because the treaty of 1783 was drawn from a map that put the source of the Mississippi in the wrong place. The river actually rises at Lake Itasca in the middle of the state, about ten meters wide and shallow enough to walk across.

Nevada

Nevada is the driest state, averaging around 250 millimeters of rain a year, and about 80 percent of its land is owned by the federal government, a larger share than anywhere else. It was rushed into the union in October 1864, days before a presidential election, partly to add votes for the Thirteenth Amendment.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island is about 4,000 square kilometers, small enough that Alaska is 425 times its size. It was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams after Massachusetts banished him for arguing that the state had no business in religion, and its charter of 1663 was the first anywhere to guarantee freedom of worship.

District of Columbia

The District is 177 square kilometers and belongs to no state, which was the point: the Constitution put the seat of government outside the jurisdiction of any one of them. Its 700,000 residents have no voting member of Congress, which is what the "taxation without representation" printed on the local license plates is about.

West Virginia

West Virginia exists because of the Civil War. When Virginia seceded in 1861 the counties west of the Blue Ridge, which had few plantations and little enthusiasm for the Confederacy, broke away and were admitted as a separate state in 1863. It is the only state formed by seceding from a Confederate one.

Maine

Maine borders only one other state, fewer than any except Alaska and Hawaii, and its coastline is so cut about with bays that a shore of 370 kilometers as the crow flies measures over 5,500 following the water. It was part of Massachusetts until 1820, when it was admitted as a free state to balance Missouri.

How this one works

The other maps of the United States

India has the same map in Indian states. Mexico has the same map in Mexican states. Germany has the same map in German states. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian states. 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.