US MAP
Click any state for its capital, nickname, statehood year and region, then open its full dossier. Albers equal-area, with Alaska and Hawaii shown as insets rather than in true position.
This is an Albers conic equal-area projection, the standard choice for the United States and the one the Census Bureau uses. Equal-area means every state covers its correct share of the map, so comparing two states by eye actually works. Montana really is about fourteen times Maryland here, not merely drawn that way.
Albers achieves that by standing two reference parallels across the middle latitudes and letting shape stretch slightly north and south of them. For a country that is much wider than it is tall, that trade is nearly free: the lower 48 come out looking the way people expect, with the distortion pushed off to where there is no land to distort.
Alaska and Hawaii are drawn as insets rather than in their true positions, and they are deliberately not to scale with each other or with the mainland. Placed honestly, Alaska sits far to the northwest and Hawaii sits 4,000 km out in the Pacific, and fitting all three into one frame would shrink the lower 48 to a strip. Nearly every US reference map makes the same compromise. It is worth knowing which parts of a familiar map are a convenience: Alaska is genuinely the largest state by a wide margin, roughly two times Texas, which the inset does not show you.
Clicking a state pulls its capital, nickname, year of statehood and Census region, and links through to a full dossier. Each of the 50 dossiers carries the state's outline and flag along with its land area and rank, and every state it touches with the length of the boundary they share.
The outlines here are the same ones the US shape game uses, so studying the map is practice for the puzzle rather than a detour from it.