I can't personally recall any significant details of the dissolve of the former United States. After all, I was only five when it happened and it's not as if what was happening on what my uncle Tim often called "the wrong side" of the Atlantic had much bearing on the day to day activities of people living in Sevenoaks, Kent. There were reports on television and talk among the adults, but what small child ever pays attention to the news? The first real impact the so-called "transition" had on my life was that it left my kindergarten teacher scrambling when we were learning our globe. Yes, this here on the map is where England floats and just across the channel there's Europe with its France and its Spain and its Germany. And then she'd hesitate, banking hard east where the confusing mess of southeast Asia would rescue her from having to explain the complex geopolitics of a situation that, frankly, nobody quite understood yet.

It became something of a running joke for school children in the ensuing years. Maps of the western hemisphere kept changing, if only in names and other designations. My father told me that it was a similar experience for his generation when the Berlin Wall fell. He was only 3 when that happened, but textbooks kept on falling out of date because one little former bloc country would divide like a replicating cell into two or three different nations that insisted on being called something long and pretentious.

The truth is that not a whole lot changed for a slim majority of the population of the former USA once the dust of the initial dissolve settled. It was the people caught in the middle, the people who never really wanted the union to end, that suffered the most. I recall a professor of mine at Oxford saying, "Mr. Tanner, the Yanks never really wanted to live together. The way the Midwest has been forgotten is just the logical conclusion of a centuries-long policy of indifferent civility." Sure, that sounds good, but we know it's not as simple or as dark as that.

Or do we?

That's the question that prompted me to go on what my wife always referred to as my "damage assessment of the colonies". For over four decades I'd listened to an endless supply of pundits and self-anointed intellectuals flippantly dismissing the dissolve of the States as some sort of punishment for years of hubris, an inevitable result of a young nation's foolishness or worse yet a great victory for the US's enemies. It's so easy to toss off a comment about the pains of a foreign people, but it's no small thing to go looking for the truth of the matter. And that's exactly what I did. It took me three years, tens of thousands of miles and more Euros than I care to remember. It very nearly killed me on several occasions and it almost ended my marriage. But someone had to do this. Someone had to find out when, how and most importantly why the United States of America, well, ceased to be united.