About this item
Was Roger Williams too pure for the Puritans and what does that have to do with Rhode Island Why did Augustine Herman take ten years to complete the map that established Delaware How did Rocky Mountain rogues help create the state of Colorado All this and more is explained in Mark Steins new bookHow the States Got Their Shapes Too follows How the States Got Their Shapes looks at American history through the lens of its borders but while How The States Got Their Shapes told us why this book tells us who This personal element in the boundary stories reveals how we today are like those who came before us and how we differ and most significantly how their collective stories reveal not only an historical arc but as importantly the often overlooked human dimension in that arc that leads to the nation we are todayThe people featured in How the States Got Their Shapes Too lived from the colonial era right up to the present They include African Americans Native Americans Hispanics women and of course white men Some are famous such as Thomas Jefferson John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster Some are not such as Bernard Berry Clarina Nichols and Robert Steele And some are names many of us know but dont really know exactly what they did such as Ethan Allen who never made furniture though he burned a good deal of itIn addition How the States Got Their Shapes Too tells of individuals involved in the Almost States of America places we sought to include but ultimately did not Canada the rest of Mexico we did get half Cuba and still an issue Puerto Rico Each chapter is largely driven by voices from the time in the form of excerpts from congressional debates newspapers magazines personal letters and diaries Told in Mark Steins humorous voice How the States Got Their Shapes Too is a historical journey unlike any other youve taken The strangers you meet here had more on their minds than simple state lines and this book makes for a great new way of seeing and understanding the United States.
About the Author
Mark Stein is the author of How the States Got Their Shapes, a New York Times Bestseller that became the basis of the History Channel series of the same name, and its companion book, How the States Got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines, which answers the question: Since no child ever said, "When I grow up, I want to create a state line," how did the people who did so end up doing so? He also wrote American Panic: A History of Who Scares Us and Why, which traces rhetorical devices that have recurred in political panics from the Salem Witch Hunt to the present, and reveals why some people are more susceptible to such rhetoric than others -- regardless of educational level or where they reside on the political spectrum. His most recent book,Vice Capades: Sex, Drugs, and Bowling from the Pilgrims to the Present, explores the kinship between punishable vice and political power -- as in the case of bowling, which was illegal in all of this country's thirteen colonies...except New York. That colony had a large Dutch population; the Dutch had brought bowling to the New World; they prospered and became wealthy in what became, under the British, New York. And wealth is powerful. And the Dutch liked to bowl. Indeed, the oldest park in New York is Bowling Green.In film, Stein wrote the screenplay for Housesitter, which starred Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. His plays have been produced off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and at such regional theatres as South Coast Repertory, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, L.A.'s Fountain Theatre, the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, CA, and an award-winning production of his play, Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys at Chicago's Raven Theater. Stein lives in Washington, D.C., where he has taught at Catholic University and American University. More about Mark Stein or contact at http://www.marksteinauthor.com/
