Since my three additions to the list have been Ninja’ed, I’ll contribute that I had cause to Google for the same list a decade ago. In addition to the three oversights just mentioned, the older list had three differences due to population change:
Nashville, Tennessee is a newcomer: Memphis was larger in the 2010 census.
Columbia, South Carolina is capital and was largest in 2000 census.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana is capital and was largest for a few years in 2000’s. :eek:
:smack: While I can’t find a video of the “There’s More than Corn in Indiana,” I’m pretty sure it uses the same melody as “Back Home Again in Indiana.” I do know that song, but had no idea it was sung before the Indy 500, and don’t know more lyrics than the title words. I can’t imagine it’s an internationally well-known song. I’d say the same for Oklahoma. I know there’s a musical with that name, so presumably a song with that name, but I have no idea how it goes. (And looking it up on Youtube, it’s completely unfamiliar to me. Seems like “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning” is the only song I know from that musical.) Unless that post was referring to another song with Oklahoma in the title.
Columbus absorbed most of its suburbs some time back. That makes it the biggest city in Ohio, but the metro area is not much larger than the city.
I’m American and a geography nerd. Naming all the states and their capitals, Canadian provinces/territories and capitals, and Australian states and capitals would be very easy. But doing the equivalent for England results in problems.
I could probably name most of the English counties, but the problem there is that they aren’t fixed. At any time, Parliament could change them in all sorts of ways: merge them, change boundaries, split them up, or outright eliminate them and replace them with regions or something. And, in fact, they’ve done these things, not just once, but several times. It’s hard to keep track of what all has happened along these lines, so any list I make up would be a mixture of current regions, historic counties and ceremonial counties (not sure if there’s a difference between the latter two categories). So unless someone really wants me to, I’m not going to make up such a list.
The same problem also applies to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, BTW.
I spent the first 40 years of my life living east of the Mississippi. States to the west of same I knew by name, but had a sketchy knowledge of how they all related to one another spacially. I remember, upon moving to Colorado, being shocked that if one drove south long enough one would reach New Mexico.
While people have often heard of Washington state, many of those same people guess it must be somewhere near Washington DC.
It’s easier to explain where I’m from if I say “north of San Francisco.”
The wife’s cousin ended up not going to school in the US, but she did look into it and one day told me she was strongly considering the University of Washington DC. She was sorely disappointed when I informed her the University of Washington was clear across the country from DC.
She could go to Washington University, maybe she’d run into some politicians. Either that or catch some waves at California University or Miami University.
I’ve set foot in two of those, my boss was from a third. But I haven’t rattled out every state I know of because I know I’m unusual, as I’ve loved geography since forever and actually lived Over There.
Mom is a pretty bad navigator, Dad loved maps and liked going to places he hadn’t been before. All that combined into him teaching us about maps as soon as he thought we’d be able to open them without breaking them or wrapping ourselves in map. My brother Jay and I will encounter a place name that we don’t know where it is and look it up, and both of us consume a lot of American media.
Several people have mentioned thinking that foreigners will know about New York City but not New York State. For the bad-at-geography Spaniards I mentioned before it’s the opposite: same as they assume that every Spanish capital is named like its province and vice versa, they’ll take it for granted that New York is in New York and Chicago is in Chicago. And they will be very surprised when they’re told that no, the capital of New Jersey is not called Jersey or Jersey City or New Jersey City…
New York, California, Texas and Florida are the ones I’d expect people in other countries to know. Primarily because TV shows and tourism often reference those states.
IIRC Dallas was exported around the globe. “Who shot JR”? Is an identifiable question in many countries that see our old syndicated TV shows.
A soap opera is one way to introduce the World to Texas.
Obviously I must be including parts of other states, to reach a total greater than the state of New York. And what other way of measuring besides population would be relevant?
