If you managed to stay awake for some of
your high school U.S. history classes, you have at least a vague sense of the
country’s story as a series of maps. The only really fixed parameter on maps of
the colonial era has been the Atlantic seaboard, which provided the dominant
feature on each of the original thirteen colonies, whose westward boundaries
were, as a matter of settlement, measured in dozens of miles, and whose northern
and southern boundaries were often represented as straight lines understood to
extend indefinitely. Such maps were often more aspiration than reality, because
at the very moment they were being produced by the English, the French had their
own maps that occupied some of the same territory. And though they weren’t
published in any modern or conventional sense of the term, Indian tribes had
their own maps that also portrayed
them as occupying (or, at any rate, claiming) the same territory.
With the end of the American Revolution
and a complex series of negotiations that culminated in the Treaty of Paris in
1783, the newly created United States of America was now depicted by itself and
Europeans as a solid slab of land bounded by two bodies of water: Atlantic
Ocean in the east and the Mississippi River in the west. The boundaries of the
states themselves within that slab
(augmented by the admission of Kentucky and Vermont in 1791, followed by
Tennessee five years later) remained vague and contested in the early republic.
The government of Connecticut acknowledged the existence of New York and
Pennsylvania to its west, but claimed all territory due west of its territorial
boundaries all the way to California – a cheeky claim in all kinds of ways. One
of the few things the weak national U.S. government of the 1780s got right was
convincing such states to relinquish their claims in exchange for the national
government assuming their debts, and in passing a series of laws we have come
to know as the Northwest Ordinances. These laws, written by Thomas Jefferson,
laid down an orderly process by which new states could be created from the
unorganized pocket of the country that we typically consider the Middle West:
the five states of Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan
(1837) and Wisconsin (1848). I find it interesting that while the maps that
created these states also effectively created the justification by which a
series of Native Americans could be shoved out of this real estate, the names
of these places reflect the language of their previous inhabitants to this day
(Michigan, for instance, is a Chippewa term that translates to “great water,”
which does a pretty good job of describing a place whose contours are defined
by a series of lakes).
But you probably regard all this as
trivia. More vivid, perhaps, are the maps you may remember seeing countless
times in your childhood that show the huge territorial gains the United States
made in the first half of the nineteenth century. You can probably visualize
the huge wedge of land – bigger than the original U.S. itself – known as the
Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson, overriding his small government scruples,
purchased from France in 1803. You can probably also see the Mexican Cession of
1848, another huge chunk of territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War
that made the U.S. a continental power. In between, literally and figuratively,
was Texas, created as independent state by American settlers who revolted
against Mexico in 1836 and whose admission into the Union nine years later was
a cause of the Mexican War. Then there was the Oregon territory, a
split-the-difference resolution of a boundary dispute between the U.S. and
Great Britain in 1846 that gave us that states of Oregon, Washington, and
Idaho, as well as slivers of Montana and Wyoming. Florida, another purchase,
became essentially an offer a badly weakened Spanish empire couldn’t refuse in
1819 after General Andrew Jackson chased some Creek and Seminole Indians into
it. Sell it or lose it, the Spaniards were essentially told. Decades of war
against the Seminoles followed.
That pretty much fills in the map,
though the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 added a big piece of North
America that isn’t contiguous with the “Lower 48” (as Alaskans like to call
it), and the annexation of Hawaii became an important naval base in the
Pacific. Other acquisitions, like Guam and Puerto Rico (wrested from Spain in
the Spanish-American War of 1898) have not been fully integrated into the
United States. But the process of nation building is now largely complete, and
largely centered on North America. The last two contiguous states to enter the
Union on the North American continent, Arizona and New Mexico, were added in
1912. Alaska and Hawaii came aboard in 1959. It’s possible that Puerto Rico
join the Union at some point – Puerto Ricans are ambivalent at the prospect –
but as likely as not the number of stars on the flag isn’t going to get any
larger.
Which may be why you probably don’t think much about what
might be termed the territorial integrity of the United States. The map hasn’t
changed any since the time your parents were born; it’s something you take for
granted. You know you live in a big country, which was, compared to most of
Europe, pretty big even in its original state (King Charles II’s 1682 grant to
William Penn for Pennsylvania was bigger than England). Indeed, as nations go,
they don’t come much bigger: the United States today is the third-largest
nation on the planet as a matter of geography, coming in behind Russia and
Canada. (It happens to be number three in population size as well, behind China
and India). Given that about half of Russia and Canada are sealed under
permafrost – at least for now –
the U.S. has more on its rivals than mere square mileage would suggest. There’s
a lot to work with between the redwood forest and the New York island.
But for all the charm in its variety –
all those places you can ski, swim, survey autumn foliage or arid mesas – the
span and diversity of the United States seems, as a matter of your national
identity, secondary at best. Instead, it’s the abstractions that matter: common
language, common law, common market. If these are not phenomenal achievements –
I believe they are, ones that other societies past and present can only envy –
they have certainly conferred tremendous benefits and indeed explain much of
the nation’s rise to international pre-eminence. They have stitched the country
together in ways that transcend any number of geographic differences. For proof
you need not consider the virtually identical burger and fries (or pizza, or
burrito) you can procure anywhere in a 3,000 mile span, but rather the rituals,
from football games to proms, you can find at just about any American high
school.
You realize that there are variations in
climate and landscape across the continent, and that they have consequences in
terms of accent and custom. But even if you’re not a big NASCAR fan, don’t
celebrate Patriots Day or eat a lot of gumbo, you know about all these things
thanks to a tightly stitched national media market and understand that they all
fall under a capacious umbrella we know as American. I’m most aware of this
when I watch a sports network like ESPN, where a scoreboard shows a dozen or
more ball games taking place simultaneously at cities around the country, or
when, coming out of a commercial break, a TV network gives us a shot of a local
landmark before returning to the stadium. Geographic diversity is charming.
But I’m here to tell you that the shape
of the United States is a little more fluid than you think, and that those maps
that form the backdrop of our lives are at least a little illusory. As
Americans, we tend to conflate the terms nation
(a political construct), state (a
geographic one) and country (a
cultural one). But Kurds, a people sharing customs, language and history
sprawled across Iraq, Turkey and other states in the Middle East, would not do
this. Iraq, a state that consists of multiple – and hostile – ethnicities and
religions, exists principally as a state because of the way the British drew
its boundaries a century ago. Britain itself is a nation that includes
Scotland, a country that in recent years has sought and received a measure of
political autonomy. Much of the misery of the world derives from the lack of
alignment between state, nation, and country.
Next: A sense of place -- and its contenders
