Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above shows what the French call the “Gulf of America”. To them it’s still just: “Le Golfe du Mexique.”
On January 20, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America within U.S. federal documents and communications.
The map above comes from the cover of Daniel Immerwahr’s best selling book: How To Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States.
Out of curiosity I decided to look at the size of the various territories mentioned on the cover relative to the size of the 48 contiguous United States.
All the three horse related maps here are the work of @hdk_maps.
The map above shows The number of horses per capita in the United States.
All the maps here are the work of Josh Katz.
The first 9 are from his book Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: a Visual Guide and the rest are from his earlier work as a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University.
This map solves that.
From the author:
Map created by Visual Capitalist
The map above shows shows the number of Fortune 500 companies that are headquartered in each state. The data comes from the 2024 edition of the Fortune 500, which ranks America’s top companies by revenue (and not by profit or number of employees).
Here’s the full list by state:
The biggest is King Ranch at 825,000 acres or 3,338 km2 (1,289 sq miles).
This is more then double the size of London or 3 times larger than all 6 of Europe’s micro states combined.
Full list:
Below is an overview of these states as they existed in 1776:
The meals are:
The table below gives the gun ownership breakdown for each US state with data coming from Data Panda.