Скачать или смотреть Our States Have Crazy Shapes

Our speaker this week was Lynn Garthwaite, author of “Our States Have Crazy Shapes: Panhandles, Bootheels, Knobs and Points". Lynn is a long time resident of Bloomington and for ten years worked for Bloomington schools in the media center at Poplar Bridge Elementary. She also served for 11 years as a Bloomington Police re-serve officer and retired as a sergeant.
Although she has written stories her entire life, she began writing professionally in 2005. Her published books include 6 children’s books as well. She is currently working on another non-fiction book that explores the mysterious places on our planet — and in her spare time runs a non-profit called Books on Wings which has a mission to help close the achievement gap in Minnesota.
Lynn led us through some fascinating stories about how our states borders came to be. She said that she was inspired to write this book because the conversation came up one day and when she decided to research the subject, the one book she found on it was not very engaging. Her book is the culmination of 3 years of research!
Among the points of interest:
The upper peninsula of Michigan was awarded to the state as compensation for losing Toledo to Ohio. --Western states such as North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas were intended to be of similar size, roughly 3 degrees high, and 7 degrees wide.
Eastern states have squiggly lines that follow rivers and mountains while western states are boxy and follow railroad lines.
The Missouri boot heel was the result of a 23 year old rancher lobbying Washington to have his land included in Missouri instead of Arkansas for economic reasons.
Minnesota has a bump on its head because Lake of the Woods extends farther than anyone thought when deciding on boundaries. In fact surveying errors had quite a bit to do with some state lines!
California was to be divided into 3 states until gold was discovered.
Texas gave up territory as part of the Missouri compromise in order to remain a slave owning state.
Colorado was named for its red soil and rocks.

All in all a fascinating presentation!