For people under 50 years old, that familiar grade school flag with 50 white stars in a field of blue seems so permanent, doesn't it? But Michael J. Trinklein wants to tell you, in the spirit of Sportin' Life, it ain't necessarily so.

"Lost States," his droll encyclopedia of alternative American geography, recollects the stories of more than 70 other possible American states, from ones that were vague glimmers in a madman's mind to proposed and debated entities that truly might have been.

Trinklein, who lives in Cedarburg, does not neglect the what-ifs about Wisconsin, which joined the union in 1848. He writes about recurring proposals to break off Michigan's Upper Peninsula into a new state called Superior; such proposals usually attach a piece of northern Wisconsin to the new state.

"Like many fifty-first state efforts, the big barrier for Superior would likely be population, or, more specifically, lack thereof," he writes.

Trinklein also expounds on Thomas Jefferson's little-known suggestion in 1784 to carve states out of the Great Lakes territory. In this scenario, the lower half of Wisconsin would have become a state called . . . (drum roll, please) . . . Michigania. Congress did not follow Jefferson's map, which Trinklein declares a tragedy: "In my opinion, Jefferson's states are better designed than the ones that exist today."

Former Wisconsinites played a key role in the putative republic of - we are not making this up - Rough and Ready, a slice of California mining territory. The former Badgers living there objected both to a mining tax and prohibition of alcohol, so they declared their independence in April 1850. But they voted to rejoin the union on July 4 of that year so they could celebrate American Independence Day again.

Think how much richer our folklore would be - and how much harder the questions on "Jeopardy!" could be - if some of these states had come to pass. The Yazoo land scandal of the 1700s could have resulted in one giant state called Yazoo where Alabama and Mississippi are now. Canada's Newfoundland could have belonged to us instead of our northern neighbor, and its giant namesake dog could have become Uncle Sam's sidekick. Had the suggested state of Navajo come into being, the United States would have traded the geographical anomaly of the Four Corners area for the possibility of two new Navajo senators walking into the Capitol.

For each lost state, Trinklein supplies a map that situates it in the historical era in which it was proposed. His cheeky cartographical coup is the cover map of the United States with many of the lost states projected on to it. The book's dust jacket unfolds into a large version of that map. Just don't mix it up with your child's geography homework, or you'll surely have some explaining to do.