Renaming the USA
Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about the A24 movie Civil War. The premise centers on a few brave and bothered journalists as they make their way from New York to the battle-torn U.S. capital. Now, it’s obvious that if such a war were to occur today, we would definitely have to come up with new names and borders for the resulting countries, maybe even the states as well. There is a ton of great content about this very subject, and it would be a fun rabbit hole to crawl through — but I want to look at another angle.
What if we up and decided today to rename America’s states? After all, one could argue there is good reason to do so. Several state names have completely unknown or disputed origins, while others are named after European placemarks and personages.
Most of the states do have quite good names, actually, and we don’t really need to change them. But, just for fun, let’s explore what alternatives could be used. Take a look…
Pacific West
Alta California (or Sierra)
California once referred to a large region of the North American Southwest, including several U.S. states (known as “Alta California”) and the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. Since the U.S. state is directly above Baja, we could change…
