Extreme points lie farther north, east, south, and west than any other point of a specific region. Here, we limit consideration to the contiguous 48 United States; the entire 50 states (so including Alaska and Hawaii); and all United States territory.

We also consider the lowest and highest elevation points to be extrema. An excellent reference with several tables and illustrations is available at wikipedia.org .

The 180th meridian, being at an arbitrarily selected location, poses certain issues for defining "easternmost" and "westernmost". This is especially true since Alaska crosses this meridian and hence contains land in the Eastern Hemisphere. We discount calling such land "easternmost" as a silly fiction generated by the date line's arbitrarily-selected location.

We define being east of a location if the shortest path, a great circle track, contains an east component, i.e. a true course on departure from 0° to 180°. A point is west of one's location if the great circle track has a true course on departure from 180° to 360°.

The following extreme points are abstracted from the above wikipedia page, and are reproduced here for the reader's convenience.

Coordinates use the NAD27 datum except where indicated by "datum uncertain" for certain extrema lying outside the contiguous 48 states. Here, the corresponding references do not specify the datum.

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