‘How States Got Shapes’ is a fun history lesson

Chicago Tribune

Watching “How the States Got Their Shapes,” the new History Channel show, is sort of like sitting through an hourlong history class taught by a fav-orite teacher. One of those classes where the topic of discussion wanders into seemingly unrelated — yet very interesting — areas. With “States,” the teacher is Brian Unger, and he really is all over the map.

Each episode, which started a 10-week run May 3, looks at how states’ boundaries came to be. Transportation, natural influences such as earthquakes, politics, religion, even cows all played parts.

In other words, how we got to where we are today. “We were looking for trying to tell contemporary stories whose DNA is rooted in the map,” says Unger, a former correspondent on “The Daily Show.” “So that way, it does sort of wander a little off the strict geography lesson. But as long as we wander back to the map, we’ll do the show justice.”

Unger says that if he only told the stories of each state’s borders, he would have 50 shows, and that’s it. But by expanding the view of the map, “we got into what I call cultural geography.”

Unger and his producers group states from different regions of the country into one episode and its theme.They visited 45 states over seven months in putting the first 10 episodes together.

“States” offers an opportunity for parents and kids to learn together.

“There is a natural appeal for kids in that they love puzzles, and adults love maps,” he said. “It’s interesting; adults remember what they learned in school, and what we do is borrow on that and correct some of the myths. And the kids like to see how all that fits together. We feel like we have a dual appeal here, not so much by design, it’s just sort of innate to the subject matter.”

Unger described a segment from the program that he thinks kids will be fascinated by: a visit to the Cumberland Gap, at the intersection of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.

“You stand at the Cumberland Gap and you imagine Daniel Boone hacking into this growth with machetes, opening a narrow path 8 feet wide, through which thousands of people walked, and wagons came through, and cattle were herded through. This opened the door to the West, I think kids will really react to that.”