"As a former U.S. Army officer in the Corps of Engineers, serious student of military history, and lover of maps, I found this book to be extremely interesting, informative, and well-documented (has ~200 pages of notes). However, having grown up in and prepared surveys/maps in Rhode Island while earning my Mechanical Engineering degree and now having lived in Connecticut for 50 years where I designed and patented jet engine components, I got a chuckle out of the New England map on page 86 because it...completely eliminates Rhode Island."It's not the first time Rhode Island has been dropped from a map. Cartographers always have trouble fitting our state's name into the little broken rectangle that graphically represents the Ocean State. (Usually they stick us out in the Atlantic somewhere with a line or arrow pointing to the state. Sometimes they cheat with the initials R.I. Occasionally they park us next to a sea serpent or, worse, New York.)
But the simmering resentment has been building. We know that back in the day the British wanted to completely eliminate Rhode Island from every map, mostly for burning their ships and ruining their tea and committing various acts of piracy all over their Union Jacks. As far back as the mid-1700s, Rhode Island was fighting with the Crown. It all came to a head in 1772, when the good folks of Warwick burned the British ship GASPEE, giving Rhode Islanders their own Independence Day anniversary (long before those johnny-come-lately Bostonians) while making the Brits really, really mad. In a London minute, they impressed our sailors (not in a good way), seized our property and, worst of all, put an end to our most lucrative industry: smuggling.
Of course, the whole map thing could just be a typo, but where's the fun in that?
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