Four lenses on the school-trust map
Switch the lens to recolor the same fifty states by a different question. Click a state to open its state dossier.
The architectural moment a state was admitted, and whether it received a federal school-land grant.
Click a legend chip to filter — Esc clears.
What this lens measures
- This lens asks
- When did each state join the union, and which generation of school-trust architecture did it inherit?
- Category structure
- A sequential palette walks from the founding (deep oxidized navy, Ch. 1) through the nineteenth-century federal eras to the twentieth-century high-water mark (warm ochre, Ch. 6). The state-derived states (Ch. 2 — Original 13 holdouts plus a few others that opted out or were never on the federal trust) take a sequence position rather than a separate color, since they overlap the federal eras in time. The timeline strip below the legend renders the same chapters as a horizontal arrow of time, with tick marks at the federal-policy moments.
- What to notice
- The federal one-section-per-township floor became two sections in 1850 and four sections in 1894. Generation-of-statehood substantially predicts how much the federal trust handed each state — the gradient encodes that progression.
Federal-trust evolution, 1785–1959
1959
Drag the marker to dim states admitted after that year. Double-click to reset.
Federal-trust chapters appear on the main bar in sequence; the state-derived chapter (Ch. 2) appears as a secondary band because its admissions overlap several federal eras in time. The federal school-land floor was one section per township in 1785, doubled in 1850, and quadrupled in 1894.
