We are so familiar with the map of the United States that our state borders seem as much a part of nature as mountains and rivers. But every edge of the familiar wooden jigsaw pieces of our childhood represents a revealing moment of history and of, well, humans drawing lines in the sand. This is the first book to tackle why our state lines are where they are. Packed with oddities and trivia, this entertaining guide also reveals the major fault lines...

Every line on the U.S. map tells a great story: California's border was bent to claw onto lucrative gold deposits ... Oklahoma's panhandle reflects a shifting national barometer for legal slavery ... Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia's shared border traces the scar of a meteor impact. The segments reveal the larger story of what makes America unique: a range of natural resources, a history of social experimentation, and a thriving democracy.

On the eve of his marriage, the Counselor makes a risky decision to dealve into the cocaine trade along the Texas-Mexico border. His hope is that this one-time deal will set him and his fiancée on a path to financial freedom, but instead he ends up in a brutal game that threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves.

Every line on the U.S. map tells a great story: California's border was bent to claw onto lucrative gold deposits ... Oklahoma's panhandle reflects a shifting national barometer for legal slavery ... Kentucy, Tennessee and Virginia's shared border traces the scar of a meteor impact. The segments reveal the larger story of what makes America unique: a range of natural resources, a history of social experimentation, and a thriving democracy.

"China's current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but "China" as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals. In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China's present-day geopolitical problems--the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea--were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and...

Between January and July 1919, after "the war to end all wars," men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully,...

Three border-crossing stories are intertwined on the contemporary U.S.-Mexican border at Tijuana: those of a young Mexican mother with three children, seeking to start a new life after her husband's death; of a gringa adventurer looking for her whale-watching brother and for a Chicana friend in search of her roots; and of a campesino seeking to cross the border for better living conditions.

"In 1880, Pemmican lay at the western edge of the Great Plains. Nearly a decade later, surveyors of the 49th parallel reached the small community to find it straddling the new Canadian-U.S. border. Now known as Bordertown, local law enforcement is dealt with on one side by Clive Bennett, a Mountie, and on the other by U.S. Marshal Jack Craddock. Whiskey traders, buffalo hunters, gold prospectors, silver miners, drifters and drunks keep the two...

The bull by the horns : Dan Thornton's rise to the heights of the Hereford world / Rodney Preston -- Hell with the lid off : a survey of the coking industry in Colorado / Glen Weaver -- Reforging the golden spike : the U.S. gold mining industry during World War II / Matt Mayberry -- A few stops along the way : Colorado's early stagecoach stations / Heather King Peterson.