The 50 States of America: The people, the places, the history

By Tim Glynne-Jones

The 50 States plus Washington DC that make up the USA all play their own unique part in the history and character of the nation. This book is an educational guide that teaches young readers about America's rich and varied history, geography and culture, and the people and places that stand out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Jul 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784285210

Tim Glynne-Jones

Tim Glynne-Jones is a writer living in Reigate, Surrey. He was born in Malaya in 1965 where his dad was working as a teacher, but returned a year later to a country celebrating winning the World Cup. He grew up in Croydon and started school on a rainy day in 1969, wearing a blue trawlerman's outfit over his shorts and cap, something he still remembers vividly, along with the milk.

Book preview

Introduction

It would be impossible, or at least pointless, to profile the 50 states of the U.S.A. without delving into history. The story of how each state came into being forms a narrative of epic proportions, which links with that of every other state like a web spanning the continent from the Florida Keys to the San Juan Islands of Washington, and later up to the Bering Strait of Alaska and across the Pacific Ocean to Honolulu.

From those first colonists seeking religious freedom to the Revolutionaries seeking freedom from tyranny, the abolitionists seeking freedom from slavery, and the pioneers seeking freedom to roam, the last 400 years have seen the piecing together of a nation so diverse it’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle of all creation. While completing this picture, we cannot overlook the role of the Native Americans, the Spanish, French, British, Mexicans, Dutch, Russians, and Hawaiians, who all had claims to parts of this great puzzle along the way.

But what a picture it forms! America has just about every geographical feature you can imagine—and quite a few that are beyond your imagination too. Vast forests, towering mountains, and volcanoes, plunging canyons, immense lakes, and endless rivers, deserts, rocks, prairies, grasslands, wetlands, and marshes, beaches, cliffs, and coastal swamps. Then there’s the wondrous array of wildlife that inhabits this diverse territory, the hurricanes, tornadoes, and hail storms that blast it, the sunshine that bakes it, and the railroads and highways that traverse it. Awesome is the word.

But just as the picture has been shaped by glaciers, eruptions, and earthquakes, it’s been shaped by people too—people who discovered, led, created, and entertained. Every state has its famous sons and daughters, people of worldwide renown, whose courage, creations, or even crimes all contributed to the way America functions today.

As you read through this book, you will hopefully piece together the picture in your mind. The U.S.A. is a vast country, made up of 48 contiguous states—the Lower 48—plus Alaska and Hawaii. How, why, and when these states all came to be part of the Union, the Land of the Free that George Washington fought for, is a fascinating story. It would take all the trees in New England to make enough paper to truly do the story justice. The aim of this book is to highlight the key points and a few quirky facts too. Because the U.S.A. would not be the U.S.A. without its quirks.

God Bless America!

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam: American bison graze on prairie near Pierre, South Dakota. They were misnamed buffalo by early settlers.

Alabama

By growing up in Alabama, I had a melting pot of the whole pie: R&B, gospel, country.

LIONEL RICHIE, SINGER

Think of Alabama and the mind drifts to cotton and slavery, To Kill a Mockingbird, and angry lynch mobs. True, the state has had a turbulent history, but as a result it has been the scene of several defining moments in the story of the U.S.A., from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement.

It has also produced some remarkable Americans, including sprinter Jesse Owens, boxer Joe Louis, and singers Hank Williams, Tammy Wynette, and Nat King Cole. Today it is a major center for the U.S. Military and NASA.

The Little River, which flows down the middle of Lookout Mountain in northeast Alabama, is the nation’s longest mountaintop river.

Stormy weather

Situated in the Deep South, hemmed in by the Appalachian Mountains in the north and the Gulf of Mexico and Florida in the south, Alabama is a mostly straight-sided state, with a little irregularity in the southeast where the border follows the Chattahoochee River and a dangly protrusion in the southwest encompassing the historically important Mobile Bay. The wide Tennessee River runs like a main artery across the northwest, with much of the state formed of wide plains, ideal for agriculture, although also susceptible to the odd hurricane and tornado.

HELEN KELLER

One of the most remarkable of all Alabamans has to be Helen Keller, the deaf and blind girl who learned to speak five languages and read and write in Braille. Keller was born on a homestead in West Tuscumbia on June 27, 1880, and lost the ability to see or hear following an illness contracted at age 19 months. She developed her extraordinary ability to communicate thanks to the work of Anne Sullivan, her teacher and companion, with whom she traveled the world, inspiring other people with disabilities and campaigning for women’s rights. Helen Keller is commemorated with her own national day on the anniversary of her birthday.

Alabama became the 22nd state to enter the Union in 1819, just over a century after two French brothers, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne d’Iberville, founded the state’s first European settlement at Old Mobile in 1702. The Spanish had set foot in Alabama in the wake of Christopher Columbus but had failed in their attempts to establish colonies there, being repeatedly fought off by the Native Americans. The state takes its name from the Choctaw word given to the Alabama River.

On April 12, 1861, a telegraph sent from the Alabama state capital of Montgomery triggered a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, near Charleston in South Carolina. The American Civil War had begun.

Civil Rights

Alabama was the fourth state to secede from the Union and Montgomery served as the headquarters of the Confederacy in the first stages of the conflict. Although the Confederates lost the war, they scored a notable first when the H.L. Hunley, built at Mobile and named after its designer Horace Hunley, became the first submarine ever to sink an enemy warship in 1864. The H.L. Hunley later sank, along with all of her crew.

By the time Alabama was readmitted to the Union in 1868, the population had boomed from 128,000 half a century earlier to one million, half of whom were black. This racial divide caused tensions that would take the best part of a hundred years to resolve, after the Civil Rights movement, which began in Alabama, won notable victories in establishing racial equality and outlawing segregation.

Although slavery was abolished after the Civil War, black people in Alabama continued to endure extreme racial prejudice. They were not entitled to vote or to sit on a jury and it was not uncommon for black men accused of capital offences to be hanged by lynch mobs before they had been tried.

A crowd of 2,000 greeted four freed Scottsboro Boys at Penn Station in 1937 as they arrived in New York after charges against them had been dropped.

CRADLE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress from Montgomery, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger. The incident caught the attention of a local Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, who took up the cause and instigated a boycott of the city’s buses. The law was changed and the Civil Rights movement gathered momentum, with King as its figurehead.

In 1931 a famous trial of nine black boys accused of raping two white women on a train brought these problems to a head. The Scottsboro Boys’ trial, so-called after the Alabama town where the boys were first imprisoned, was groundbreaking in bringing about the end of all-white juries, following an intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The trial inspired Alabama lawyer Nelle Harper Lee to write the novel To Kill A Mocking Bird. It has been recognized as the most influential book in America after the Bible.

DID YOU KNOW?

The first ever U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, was launched from a rocket built at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama.

Alaska

For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale, nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon.

SAM ABELL, PHOTOGRAPHER

Famous for moose, mountains, and controversial, gun-toting former governor Sarah Palin, Alaska is the biggest state in the United States and the least densely populated. For example, it is 13 times the size of Alabama, yet has only one sixth of the population. It is one of the world’s great natural wildernesses, a land of mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, rivers, and lakes located in the north-west corner of the North American continent, and closer to Russia (51 miles across the Bering Strait) than the rest of the U.S.A. (500 miles across Canada).

It’s cold up there (as low as -80˚F in the interior) and that suits an abundance of wildlife, including brown, black, and polar bears, moose, caribou, and bald eagles, as well as many species of whale that visit Alaska’s lengthy coastline each year.

A totem pole in Saxman Nature Village, Ketchikan: Totems tell stories—some were designed to ridicule those who had failed to honor tribal debts.

A humpback whale breaches off Alaska. Humpbacks are acrobatic and can jump a long way out of the water, often slapping the surface when they land.

From Russia with love

Alaska became the property of the United States on March 30, 1867 when it was bought from the Russian Empire for $7.2million (the equivalent of about $116million today). Its many indigenous peoples, such as the Aleut, who give their name to Alaska’s extensive chain of islands called the Aleutian Islands, are believed to have arrived from what is now Russia via a land bridge, at a time in prehistory when the Bering Strait was not under water.

MOUNT MCKINLEY

Of the 20 highest peaks in the United States, 17 are in Alaska and the biggest of all is Mt. McKinley. Rising a massive 20,237ft (nearly four miles) above sea level, Mt. McKinley is the highest mountain in North America and one of the tallest mountains in the world measured from base to summit. It is part of the Alaska Range, which runs for 600 miles and features many other mighty peaks, ending in the Denali park in Alaska’s interior. Incredibly, fish fossils have been found near the peak, proving that this mighty mountain once lay beneath the sea.

Mt McKinley takes its name from William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, who actually never went near the mountain. It was named in his honor by a supporter during his presidential election campaign and the name stuck, although there is a campaign today to rename it Denali (the high one), the name originally given to it by the Koyukon Athabaskan people who inhabit the area around it.

The early years of the 20th century saw a rise in Alaska’s population, caused first by the Klondike gold rush in neighboring Yukon and then by a second gold rush in Nome. But gold was a short-lived shot at fortune. More sustainable industries were logging and fishing, which were established by settlers from Norway and Sweden and remain two mainstays of Alaska’s economy.

Anchorage is farther north than Oslo, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Helsinki, but not as far north as Murmansk or Reykjavik.

Earthquake!

On January 3, 1959, Alaska was admitted as the 49th state of America and although it has no geographical connection with any other part of the U.S.A., it is a significant and dramatic addition. It has more than 70 active volcanoes and is hit by at least 5,000 earthquakes each year.

On Friday March 27, 1964, it was shaken by the second-biggest earthquake in recorded history. Known as The Good Friday Earthquake, it took place near Anchorage around teatime and rattled the china with a magnitude of 9.2. The quake opened up giant fissures in the ground, flattened entire villages, and caused a tsunami that could be detected as far away as Antarctica.

Although Juneau is the state capital, Anchorage is the biggest metropolitan area, with around half of Alaska’s population living there. The city’s importance stems from having been the headquarters of the Alaska Railroad Project, which built a rail link to carry freight and passengers 470 miles north into the interior.

Juneau became the capital in 1906, taking over from Sitka, which had become the capital under the Russians. It was originally named Rockwell and then Harrisburg, after a gold prospector called Richard Harris, but it was another prospector, Canadian Joe Juneau, who managed to get his name to stick. There are no roads in or out of Juneau, due to its rugged surroundings, so it relies entirely on sea and air for its connection to the outside world.

BEAR ESSENTIALS

The grizzly is a species of brown bear, but in Alaska there is an even bigger example, the Kodiak bear. Large males tower up to almost 10ft tall when standing on their back legs and weigh in at 1,500lb. Alaska is home to an estimated 30,000 brown bears and is the best place in the whole continent to see these magnificent creatures, but take care! The brown bear is Alaska’s number one predator and they don’t take kindly to being disturbed, especially when they’re just about to have lunch!

Arizona

"I grew up in Arizona. I love it.