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This 7-DVD History Channel set offers American History nerds a haven they so desperately deserve....
A&E / 890 Minutes / 2011-2012 / Unrated / Street Date: September 18, 2012
It's fair to say that with All About the States, you get what you pay for. This compilation contains not only the entire How the States Got Their Shapes series, but its followup show, The States, which spends ten episodes surveying the U.S. of A. with in-depth style. Sure, in a lot of ways, it's nothing more than an exceptionally long History Channel broadcast, but I've been known to fall into shows like that for hours on end, so I know what kind of an addiction TV-on-DVD sets like All About the States can flame.
How the States Got Their Shapes, based on a book by Mark Stein, goes into issues big and small about how division lines among our fair states of the union look the way they do, and how they keep evolving. What makes the show so effortlessly engaging is the minutiae of decisions that were taken into consideration creating the topographic lines in the sand that separate our lower 48 (and Alaska, too, for that matter).
We get investigations into post-war compensations (Arizona ceded a bunch of land to Nevada because of AZ's support of the CSA during the American Civil War), squabbles over resources (Tennessee's and Georgia's dispute over the Tennessee River and who gets which part of it turns downright nasty in parts), and for those UFO conspiracy theorists out there, we get lengthy investigations as to why the US government owns more than 80% of Nevada (show us the little green men!).
If you already happily own How the States Got Their Shapes, I have bad news for you - you're going to need to check out this expanded edition....