Mark Stein who wrote the original book “How the States got their Shapes” has written a followup “How the States got their Shapes Too, The People Behind the Borderlines.”
fusoya:
True enough, I guess I just find it odd because it’s not like the portion of Colorado to its immediate west is much more or less of a major population center than the parts of Kansas immediately to the east which are still on Central Time. It’s a pretty homogenous continuum of small towns, not, say, a wasteland followed by a cluster of towns near the border. True, Denver is closer to those areas than Wichita is, but that’s still about 200 miles away. So I don’t necessarily understand why the people of far west Kansas would be more connected to the people of far east Colorado than to slightly-less-far-west Kansas.
Tim Burton has the movie rights, which is scary because it means we’ll see Johnny Depp as Abe, Helena Bonham Carter as Mary Todd, the White House will be blue and have walls at a 60 degree angle, and an animatronic J.W. Booth.
When time zones were first drawn they went pretty much according to the lines of longitude, then they move the borders. For instance, Detroit was in Central Time Zone.
People in the westernmost part of the time zones would often request to be moved to the next time zone, because this would give them the advantage of “year round daylight saving time.” For example Indiana was originally on Central Time. By moving into Eastern Time (except for the areas by Chicago and Evansville), Indiana was effectively on DST. This is one of the reasons Indiana had against DST (previously), as they were already on it.
For Kansas, Denver is a much bigger town than Wichita, especially when the time zones were first drawn up. Denver was more likely to be local distribution center than Wichita. The next “real size” city being “Kansas City, MO”
I remember my first trip driving through Washington, and thinking the “George’s Head” signs were kind of weird.
But then I found out that a couple of midwest states have their informational signs in the shape of Millard Fillmore’s head (in a cardboard box).
Because that’s where all their TV stations come from.
On the TV show Jericho, that town in Kansas held a special significance in the storyline since it was the location in the continental US the farthest away from a major city, the closest one being Denver.
Anyone else catch the premiere? I really liked it. In that two-hour special, they covered a whole bunch of different things, but in this one-hour episode they really only focused on three things, the Georgia/Tennessee border, the affect of glaciers on Maine, and the importance of the Colorado River to the southwest. It wasn’t all about borders either. The whole part about Maine didn’t really even talk about it’s shape until the very end.
I also liked the fact that Unger got to use a bit more humor. It reminded me of a history-based version of Dirty Jobs, especially the scene at “the source” of Poland Springs.
One of the brief previews showed him asking someone to draw the time zones, so I guess you’re in luck.