Reimagining The United States As Having Only 1 To 20 States With New Names

All of these maps come from reddit user happygrizzly and reimagine the United States if only had X number of states between 1 and 20.

And when asked about: “Why does the capital of California (or regions including it) keep switching between Los Angeles and San Francisco?”

He replied:

Good question. LA starts out as the major metropolis for huge regions like the West, etc.

When Alaska and Hawaii break off and create the West Coast region of CA, OR, and WA, the capital switches to SF to be a more central hub among those three states.

When California becomes its own region that necessity becomes less pronounced and changing the capital back to LA helps give it its own identity. Likewise, the final switch back to SF was intended to give the new region of Tahoe a fresher “feel” besides just being California plus Nevada, especially since California is the only state that goes from being its own region back to sharing with another.

I didn’t switch capitals like this with Chicago and New York because those cities dwarf their surroundings much more than LA does versus SF.