American History

which tribe a word came from or what the word "means" you can find that all over the internet (although there is a fair amount of wrong info out there).

My book covers more of what George R. Stewart called "the motivation of the namer". I wanted to tell the whole story of how the word came to be applied to the state. And there are some very interesting stories out there, even for states where you think the derivation is "obvious".

For instance...

The word "Wyoming" comes from a small valley in Ohio, but came to be applied to a region a thousand miles away.

The word "Idaho" was made up by a man named George "Doc" Willing as a kind of practical joke. He wanted it to sound like an aboriginal word, and even gave it a fake meaning: "gem of the mountains". He intended it to be proposed as the name for what is now Colorado.

Many names that we use for native tribes are those that were given to them by their neighbors, often their enemies; they had their own names for themselves. For example, the Missouri called themselves "Niutachi", the Arkansas called themselves "Quapaw", and the Iowa called themselves "Pahoches."

There are lots of other stories surrounding the names of our states, many of them very funny. There are also some new, compelling theories about how some states were named (e.g. Oregon, Arizona and Maine), and there are still some mysteries surrounding a few of the names; for instance, we still don't know for sure what the word "Iowa" means, and we don't know the motivation behind changing the name of "Alabama" from it's originally proposed name, "Mobile".

These are some of the topics I researched and wrote about. I'll admit, it takes a certain kind of nerd to enjoy this stuff, but I count myself among them.