Bought from Russia for two cents an acre
In 1867 the United States bought ALASKA from Russia for 7.2 million dollars, about two cents an acre. Many Americans thought it a waste of money on a frozen wilderness, and newspapers mocked it as Seward's Folly, after William Seward, the official who arranged the deal. Gold was found there in the 1890s, and oil in the 1960s, and nobody laughs about the price now. Alaska is by far the largest state, bigger than TEXAS, CALIFORNIA and MONTANA put together.
Alaska and HAWAII became the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in 1959, and Hawaii, a chain of volcanic islands in the Pacific, is the only state made entirely of islands and the only one that was once a kingdom, with its own royal palace in Honolulu.
Names from many languages
About half of the state names come from Native American languages. UTAH is named after the Ute people. OHIO comes from a Seneca word for a great river, and KANSAS from the Kansa people. MICHIGAN probably comes from an Ojibwe word for a large lake, and ALABAMA, IDAHO, WYOMING and many more have similar roots. Others come from Europe: FLORIDA is Spanish for flowery, named by an explorer who landed around Easter in 1513, VERMONT is from French for green mountain, and GEORGIA and VIRGINIA honour English monarchs.
CALIFORNIA takes its name from a fictional island of gold in a Spanish adventure story written in the early 1500s, long before anyone had mapped the real place.
Why so many straight lines?
Look at a map of the United States and the eastern states have wiggly borders that follow rivers, coastlines and mountain ridges, while many western states are made of long straight lines. The eastern borders were settled in colonial times, often along natural features. The western ones were drawn by surveyors in the 1800s along lines of latitude and longitude, across land that few of them had ever seen.
Even the straight ones are not quite straight. COLORADO looks like a perfect rectangle, but its border was marked out by hand with chains and markers, and small surveying errors mean it actually has hundreds of tiny kinks. The capital of Alaska, Juneau, cannot be reached by road from the rest of North America at all; people arrive by sea or by air. Vermont's capital, Montpelier, is the smallest state capital, with fewer than ten thousand people.
Records and oddities
California has the most people, about 39 million, more than any other state. WYOMING has the fewest, under 600,000. MAINE is the only state that borders just one other state, New Hampshire. At the Four Corners, a single point in the desert, ARIZONA, Utah, COLORADO and New Mexico meet, and visitors can stand in all four states at once.
Texas was an independent country, the Republic of Texas, for nearly ten years before it joined the United States in 1845. NEVADA is the driest state, and its nickname, the Silver State, comes from the silver strikes of the 1850s. OREGON, INDIANA and the rest each have their own nickname and flag. Our US presidents page covers the people who led the country as it grew from thirteen states to fifty.