“I know it sounds harsh, but Rhode Island is too small to be a state….

“If you have any doubts, you need only look at the map. New England, as you can see, is a top-heavy protrusion squared off at the bottom…. Maine of course takes up all the uneven, misshapen space at the top right, which is fine for Maine, because nobody pays attention to Maine anyway.

“New Hampshire and Vermont, by contrast, fit together in a perfectly tidy and orderly Yankee way, one bulging a bit in the north and the other doing the same in the south. They couldn’t be a better match. Beneath them, Massachusetts occupies a sensible, rectangular slab of territory with a somewhat untidy slop-over at Cape Cod. … Rhode Island, I’m afraid, is something else. Rhode Island does not compute.

“Look at the way it cringes there, occupying a sliver of land so inconsequential that the names of its cities and towns have to be entered vertically on the map. It is foolish for something so microscopic to go around posing as a state….’’

— Donald Dale Jackson (1935-2005), in “The Farewell State,’’ in a 2000 Smithsonian Magazine article