Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 16:06:55 -0500
From: Ted White <tedwhite at compusnet.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: West Virginia
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

lee gilliland wrote:

>         Ah, Ron, you have touched on another of my obscure hobbies:
> alternate United States.  Among the many proposals for states that never
> materialized were Westsylvania in modern western Pennsylvania and Ohio,
> Vandalia in Ohio-Indiana, Franklin in modern Tennessee, Jefferson (I) in
> Colorado, Jefferson (II) in northwestern Texas, Sequoyah in eastern
> Oklahoma, Lincoln (I) in southern Texas, and Lincoln (II) in Idaho.  Back in
> the '70s a guy named Pearcy proposed revising the entire 50 United States to
> have only 38 states, all with new names.  Under this proposal, northern
> Virginia (and D.C.) would join Maryland to form the new state of Chesapeake.
> During the Civil War, the Confederates attempted to organize territories of
> Arizona and New Mexico within in the former New Mexico Territory.  However,
> their proposed territories were long and narrow like Tennessee rather than
> the current squarish models.  The idea was never effective and was
> suppressed entirely when the California National Guard invaded Texas.
>         One of the major historical reasons for the differences between
> Virginia and West Virginia was that West Virginia was colonized primarily by
> Marylanders moving west thru Harper's Ferry while central Virginia was
> colonized primarily by Tidewater Virginians moving west thru Richmond.
>
> You missed one, Lee - although I can't recall the name of the proposed state
> (it will undoubtedly come to me at 3;22 am Saturday) there was a movement
> afoot in Buffalo, NY in the 1840s and -50s to take Grand Island, which is in
> the middle of the Niagara River and about 10 miles square, into a
> blacks-only state.  Abolitionists, of course.  Isn't obscure history fun?

Just an idle question -- and with no desire to be obnoxious -- but why is your
response to the quotes you use not formatted to set one off from the other?
The above is a good example.   You quote The Other Lee without any attribution,
and your response is simply another paragraph.   This is mildly confusing,
especially to those of us more used to e-lists and newsgroups where the quoted
material is attributed (as above:  "lee gilliland wrote") and usually set off
with >s.

Now my email client (Netscape) does this automatically for me, selecting the
name of the person I'm responding to and setting off the quote, as soon as I hit
the "reply" button over any post.   Obviously yours does not -- or you're not
using that function.   That being the case, you *could* manually type in an
attribution (more work, I know), and you *should* separate your response in some
fashion typographically, whether with a few *** or === or just a "Lee G. here:"

I might add, for those who include lotsa previous quotes dangling unnecessarily
below their posts that it's easy to delete it.  When your cursor is hovering,
blinking, at the end of your post (which should be a signature/sign-off), and
more stuff is below it, just hit Shift/Ctrl/End and all that material will be
highlighted and can be deleted with one stroke (Delete).

--Ted White