Unless you belong to an old­er gen­er­a­tion, you prob­a­bly can’t remem­ber the last time the map of the Unit­ed States under­went any major change. For decades, the bound­aries have remained pret­ty fixed. And yet the map, as we know it, should­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be con­sid­ered set in stone.

If bil­lion­aire Tim Drap­er has his way, Cal­i­for­nia vot­ers will decide in 2018 whether Cal­i­for­nia, the home to near­ly 40 mil­lion peo­ple, should be divid­ed into three states called “North­ern Cal­i­for­nia,” “South­ern Cal­i­for­nia,” and plain “Cal­i­for­nia.” His argu­ment being that Cal­i­for­nia has become too large to gov­ern, and that pow­er should be moved toward small­er, more local­ly gov­erned enti­ties. Mean­while, on a par­al­lel track, anoth­er group is push­ing for Cal­i­for­nia to leave the union alto­geth­er. Right there, we have two ini­tia­tives that could change the map as we know it.

And then there was the time when, back in 1973, George Etzel Pearcy, a Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty geog­ra­phy pro­fes­sor, pro­posed re-draw­ing the map of the nation, reduc­ing the num­ber of states to 38, and giv­ing each state a dif­fer­ent name. In his cre­ative rework­ing of things, Cal­i­for­nia would be split into two states–“El Dora­do” and “San Gabriel”. Texas would divide into “Alamo” and also “Shawnee” (along with rem­nants of Okla­homa). And the Dako­tas would fuse into one big “Dako­ta.” In case you’re won­der­ing, Pearcy chose the names by polling geog­ra­phy stu­dents.

The log­ic behind the new map was explained in a 1975 edi­tion of The Peo­ple’s Almanac.

Why the need for a new map? Pearcy states that many of the ear­ly sur­veys that drew up our bound­aries were done while the areas were scarce­ly pop­u­lat­ed. Thus, it was con­ve­nient to deter­mine bound­aries by using the land’s phys­i­cal fea­tures, such as rivers and moun­tain ranges, or by using a sim­ple sys­tem of lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude.… The prac­ti­cal­i­ty of old estab­lished State lines is ques­tion­able in light of Amer­i­ca’s ever-grow­ing cities and the increas­ing mobil­i­ty of its cit­i­zens. Met­ro­pol­i­tan New York, for exam­ple, stretch­es into 2 adja­cent States. Oth­er city pop­u­la­tions which cross State lines are Wash­ing­ton, D.C., St. Louis, Chica­go, and Kansas City. The “strad­dling” of State lines caus­es eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal prob­lems. Who should pay for a rapid tran­sit sys­tem in St. Louis? Only those cit­i­zens with­in the bound­aries of Mis­souri, or all res­i­dents of St. Louis’s met­ro­pol­i­tan area, includ­ing those who reach over into the State of Illi­nois?…

When Pearcy realigned the U.S., he gave high pri­or­i­ty to pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty, loca­tion of cities, lines of trans­porta­tion, land relief, and size and shape of indi­vid­ual States.  When­ev­er pos­si­ble lines are locat­ed in less pop­u­lat­ed areas. In the West, the desert, semi­desert, or moun­tain­ous areas pro­vid­ed an easy method for divi­sion. In the East, how­ev­er, where areas of scarce pop­u­la­tion are hard­er to deter­mine, Pearcy drew lines “try­ing to avoid the thick­er clus­ters of set­tle­ment.”  Each major city which fell into the “strad­dling” cat­e­go­ry is neat­ly tucked with­in the bound­aries of a new State. Pearcy tried to place a major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in the cen­ter of each State. St. Louis is in the cen­ter of the State of Osage, Chica­go is cen­tered in the State of Dear­born. When this method proved impos­si­ble, as with coastal Los Ange­les, the city is still locat­ed so as to be eas­i­ly acces­si­ble from all parts of the State…

Accord­ing to Rob Lamm­le, writ­ing in Men­tal Floss, Pearcy ini­tial­ly got sup­port from “econ­o­mists, geo­g­ra­phers, and even a few politi­cians.” But the proposal–mainly out­lined in a book called A 38 State U.S.A.–even­tu­al­ly with­ered in Wash­ing­ton, the place where ideas, both good and bad, go to die.

Below you can watch an ani­ma­tion show­ing how US map has changed in 200 years.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Lets You Down­load Thou­sands of Maps from the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

Stephen F. Stein­bach, a res­i­dent of Vien­na and a “car­tog­ra­phy, lan­guage and trav­el enthu­si­ast, with an engi­neer­ing back­ground,” is not a lin­guist. Stein­bach, who runs the site Alter­na­tive Trans­port, seems much more inter­est­ed in map­ping and trans­porta­tion than mor­phol­o­gy and ety­mol­o­gy. But he has made a con­tri­bu­tion to a lin­guis­tic con­cept called “lex­i­cal dif­fer­ence” with the map you see above, a col­or­ful 2015 visu­al­iza­tion of Euro­pean lan­guages, grouped togeth­er in clus­ters accord­ing to their sub­fam­i­lies (Ital­ic-Romance, Baltic, Slav­ic, Ger­man­ic, etc.—see a much larg­er ver­sion here).

Straight and arc­ing lines span the rel­a­tive dis­tance these lan­guages have pre­sum­ably trav­eled from each oth­er. Sol­id lines between lan­guages rep­re­sent a very close prox­im­i­ty, dashed lines of dif­fer­ent thick­ness­es show more dis­tance, and thin dot­ted lines tra­verse the great­est expans­es.

Hun­gar­i­an and Ukrain­ian, for exam­ple, have a lex­i­cal dis­tance score of 90, where Pol­ish and Ukrain­ian, both Slav­ic lan­guages, are only 30 degrees from each oth­er. “The map shows the lan­guage fam­i­lies that cov­er the con­ti­nent,” writes Big Think, “large, famil­iar ones like Ger­man­ic, Ital­ic-Romance and Slav­ic, small­er ones like Celtic, Baltic and Ural­ic; out­liers like Semit­ic and Tur­kic; and isolates—orphan lan­guages, with­out a fam­i­ly: Alban­ian and Greek.”  (Tech­ni­cal­ly, mod­ern Greek does have a family—Hellenic—though it is the only sur­viv­ing mem­ber.)

As we might expect from this sub­set of the durable Indo-Euro­pean schema, the lan­guages with­in each clus­tered group occu­py the short­est dis­tance from each oth­er, with some excep­tions. Roman­ian, for exam­ple, is slight­ly clos­er to Alban­ian than it is to French, its Romance cousin. The Slav­ic lan­guages Russ­ian and Pol­ish seem to have trav­eled a bit fur­ther apart than Pol­ish has from the Baltic lan­guage of Lithuan­ian. What does this mean, exact­ly? Accord­ing to the mea­sure of “lex­i­cal dis­tance” pro­posed by Ukrain­ian lin­guist Kon­stan­tin Tishchenko, it means that clos­er lan­guages might be more mutu­al­ly intel­li­gi­ble, at least from a lex­i­cal stand­point, since they may share more cog­nates (sim­i­lar-sound­ing and mean­ing words) and bor­row­ings.

Gas­ton Ümlaut, the han­dle of a lin­guist on the Stack Exchange Lin­guis­tics beta, cau­tions that the con­cept of “lex­i­cal dis­tance” may be “pret­ty use­less” giv­en that the com­par­isons also include false cognates—words that sound or look sim­i­lar but have no rela­tion­ship to each oth­er. These could account for some seem­ing incon­sis­ten­cies. (Ümlaut admits he has not read the orig­i­nal arti­cle, writ­ten in Russ­ian. If you are able, you can find it online in the book Metathe­o­ry of Lin­guis­tics, here.) Stein­bach has respond­ed in the same thread.

The idea received a much more tren­chant cri­tique more recent­ly. Stein­bach clar­i­fied that the the­o­ry, and the map, only com­pare writ­ten words and not syn­tax or speech. “It has noth­ing to do with gram­mar, syn­tax, rhythm or oth­er impor­tant fea­tures that are impor­tant for intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty,” he writes. “It also com­pares a small list of words and not the entire vocab­u­lary of one lan­guage to anoth­er.” This expla­na­tion does cast doubt on whether “lex­i­cal dis­tance” is a mean­ing­ful con­cept. I’ll leave it to the lin­guists to decide. (Stein­bach reached out to Tis­chchenko but has yet to receive a reply.)

Tischchenko’s orig­i­nal “lex­i­cal dis­tance” map, fur­ther up, drawn in 1997, gets the idea across with min­i­mal fuss, but it leaves much to be desired graph­i­cal­ly. (A large, hand-drawn col­or ver­sion improves upon the print­ed map.) Stein­bach took his ver­sion from a 2008 Eng­lish-lan­guage adap­ta­tion made by Tere­sa Elms in 2008 (above). In his blog post here, he explains all of the changes he made to Elms and Tischchenko’s designs. These include adjust­ing the size of the “bub­bles” to pro­por­tion­al­ly rep­re­sent the num­ber of speak­ers of each lan­guage. Stein­bach also added sev­er­al lan­guages, as well as “grave­stones” for the dead Ana­to­lian and Tochar­i­an branch­es. In all, his map shows “54 lan­guages, rep­re­sent­ing 670 mil­lion peo­ple.” He adds, vague­ly, that “it checks out.”

After post­ing his Lex­i­cal Dis­tance Map, Stein­bach pro­posed a “3D” ver­sion, with the added dimen­sion of time. (See his pre­lim­i­nary sketch above.) The maps are intrigu­ing, the the­o­ry of “lex­i­cal dis­tance” an inter­est­ing one, but we should bear in mind, as Stein­bach writes, that he is “no lin­guist,” and that this idea is hard­ly an ortho­dox one with­in the dis­ci­pline.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co       

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

This is a sight for sore eyes. Cre­at­ed by Hun­gar­i­an geo­g­ra­ph­er and map-design­er Robert Szucs, using open-source QGIS soft­ware, the high res­o­lu­tion map above shows:

all the per­ma­nent and tem­po­rary streams and rivers of the con­tigu­ous 48 states in beau­ti­ful rain­bow colours, divid­ed into catch­ment areas. It shows Strahler Stream Order Clas­si­fi­ca­tion. The high­er the stream order, the thick­er the line.

When you look at the map, you’ll see, as The Wash­ing­ton Post observes, “Every riv­er in a col­or drains to the same riv­er, which then drains into the ocean. The giant basin in the mid­dle of the coun­try is the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er basin. Major rivers like the Ohio and the Mis­souri drain into the behe­moth.” Pret­ty impres­sive.

The map was appar­ent­ly made using data from the Euro­pean Envi­ron­ment Agency and the Rivers Net­work Sys­tem.

You can find the map on Imgur, or pur­chase “ultra high” res­o­lu­tion copies through Etsy for $8.

Szucs has als0 pro­duced data visu­al­iza­tions of the riv­er sys­tems in Chi­na, India, Europe and oth­er parts of the world.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps 

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)