“All maps have a purpose, perhaps even an agenda,” Michael J. Trinklein writes at the beginning of “Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made It.” Agendas abound in this fascinating, funny book. Some are of a practical nature: why are North Dakota and South Dakota not just one big Dakota, as many nineteenth-century legislators wanted them to be? Because the distance on horseback from the capital to outlying regions was prohibitive. Some are born of fear (or greed): in 1957, the residents of northern California, concerned that dry-as-a-desert southern California was stealing too much of their water, proposed seceding and forming their own state, to be named “Shasta.” Some were religious, as in the case of the state of “Hazard,” proposed in the seventeen-fifties by a group of Presbyterians, whose charter stipulated that it would not have any “Mass Houses or Pope-ish chapels.”
The five accompanying maps are worth a click.