Recommendation: How the States Got Their Shapes

I've been working on my upcoming story "The Chamber Chronicles", which I hope to premier sometime within the next week. In addition to working on the characters and their stories and how they will interact, I've also been working on creating the setting for the story. The "Chronicles" will take place primarily in and around the fictional town of Arcadia Springs, Oklahoma, which is supposed to be located just east of the real town of Edmond Oklahoma. What I've essentially done is create an "alternate" version of my home state of Oklahoma. In it, Guthrie remained the state capital, and the development of central Oklahoma has gone very differently. I also played with the geology a bit to place a hot springs roughly where the real town of Arcadia is.

As I was working on all of this, I was reminded of the show "How the States Got their Shapes" on The History Channel. This show explores all of the (often little known) stories of how the various states of the United States got the shapes that they have today. We often take for granted the boundaries of the states, or where certain cities are, or how important those cities are when in reality they came to be the way they are by a culmination of various events and people that quite honestly could have gone differently and resulted in a very different looking map.

The show has currently aired two seasons, both of which are available on iTunes and from The History Channel's website, and are still being aired as reruns on The History Channel. If you get a chance to catch an episode on tv, or if I've intrigued you enough that you go and download an episode or two, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

I myself only learned about the second season today, and as soon as I am able to do so I'm going to download it from iTunes.

Hope you get a chance to enjoy this really great show.