Jordan Blake Carter

Welcome to Wisconsin, where beer is practically a food group and winter is a personality test. Cheese, Chill, and Chaos is a hilarious deep dive into the people, politics, and peculiarities that shaped the state.

West Virginia is what happens when a group of mountain counties looks at the rest of their state and says, "Absolutely not."Created during the Civil War through one of the strangest political maneuvers in American history, West Virginia became a land of coal booms, labor wars, moonshine legends...

Mexico has survived empires, invasions, dictators, revolutions, economic disasters, foreign occupations, political corruption, volcanic geography, and the occasional decision to build a city on top of a lake and simply hope for the best. Somehow, against all reasonable expectations, it keeps...

Everyone thinks they know New Jersey. It's the Turnpike. The Shore. The traffic. The smell. But beneath the jokes lies one of the most important, influential, and downright bizarre states in American history. New Jersey gave America its first dinosaur skeleton, hosted more Revolutionary War...

Nebraska has spent most of American history being underestimated. Flat, boring, forgettable. Flyover country.

Canada's official national strategy has long been simple: Make a mistake. Say sorry. Change the subject. In So Sorry, Jordan Blake Carter takes listeners on an unforgettable journey through the history Canada would often rather not discuss.

Indiana was never supposed to be interesting. It was supposed to be orderly. In Hoosier Discipline: An Irreverent History of Indiana, Jordan Blake Carter dismantles the familiar image of Indiana as a bland flyover state and replaces it with something stranger, sharper, and far more revealing.

Welcome to Vermont, a place where mountains stand firm, syrup flows freely, and rebellion comes naturally. This irreverent history traces the state’s journey from its earliest Abenaki communities through colonial disputes, independence, industrial innovation, cultural renewal, and the rise of...

What do starving colonists, powdered-wig aristocrats, Confederate generals, moonshiners, civil rights activists, and data-center billionaires have in common? Virginia.

Flat. Empty. Forgettable. Wrong. South Dakota is a place of ancient stone, broken treaties, gold rush chaos, and histories that still echo today. What looks quiet from the highway turns out to be anything but. Flat Out: An Irreverent History of South Dakota digs into the real story with humor...

Texas is not just a state. It’s a performance. It’s a myth dressed in boots, dripping in barbecue sauce, swaggering through hurricanes, and bragging about high school football as if the future of civilization depended on it.

Flat, Fast, and Frequently Important: An Irreverent History of Ohio is the story of the state that somehow keeps ending up in the middle of everything while maintaining the energy of a place people mostly drive through on the way somewhere else.

Maryland is tiny. Maryland is consequential. Maryland has never once confused these two facts as being in tension.

South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum. It fired the first shots of the Civil War. It invented nullification. It blockaded its own harbor with pirates. It sent Strom Thurmond to the Senate for 48 years. It built one of the great cities of the colonial world...

Missouri has always had a talent for being exactly in the wrong place at the right time. Too north to be South, too south to be North, and too stubborn to pick a side about anything else, it has spent centuries collecting misunderstandings like souvenirs.

American democracy has always survived on a strange blend of hope, spectacle, and pure human unpredictability. This book follows fourteen politicians who pushed the limits of behavior, ambition, and reality itself. Some were brilliant. Some were reckless. Some were dangerous.

The paradise was always a sales pitch. Hawaii is one of the most visited places on Earth and one of the least honestly described.

Kentucky has been explained to death. It has been flattened into a punchline, romanticized into a symbol, and studied into abstraction. None of it has worked, because none of it has taken the place seriously on its own terms. This book does.

Pennsylvania is the state that built America while grumbling the entire time. This rollicking, sharply funny history traces its journey from Penn’s peaceful “holy experiment” to the roaring furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.

Enchantment and Exasperation is a romp through thousands of years of survival, reinvention, rebellion, and weirdness.