Review: 50 States 5000 Ideas from National Geographic

To generate new ideas for upcoming trips, I recently read the book 50 States 5000 Ideas written by Joe Yogerst, fact-checked Meg Weaver, and published by National Geographic in February 2017, and distributed by Simon & Schuster. The full-color paperback edition has 288 pages of facts and photographs and makes an excellent coffee table book for roadtrippers or a basic starting point for people who want to begin traveling but do not know where to begin. Since the book covers a lot of ground, and not always successfully, the author highlights major attractions and large cities, along with a few smaller towns, but does not give details on most location.

I experienced several frustrations while reading the book. States and provinces appear in alphabetical order, rather than by region, meaning New Mexico is listed between New Jersey and New York, rather than with Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. The side bars and colored boxes with additional information interrupted the main text and complicated how each page should be read. Since the book does not go past most major cities and well-known tourist attractions, worthy sites are left out in favor of more popular, and more crowded, options.

For me, one of the most important factors for this genre is the quality of information and the ability to check sources. This book did not come with a bibliography, and the index was short for a text of its length. When reading the sections on Worcester County of Massachusetts and Providence County in Rhode Island, where I live and visit most sites, I found significant factual inaccuracies and lack of clear explanation. Here is my list of grievances:

• The metropolitan area around Springfield, MA is listed in the book as the second largest by population, while this designation goes to the metropolitan area around Worcester, MA. (See statistics here.)
• Old Sturbridge Village is listed in the same paragraph describing Worcester, suggesting that it is located within the city. The outdoor museum is actually located in rural Sturbridge, MA, about 30 minutes away.
• An outdated piece of information in the book was listing McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, RI as the home of the minor league baseball team Pawtucket Red Sox (PawSox). The team moved to Polar Park Worcester in 2021 and was renamed to the Worcester Red Sox (WooSox).
• The author neglected to mention that McCoy Stadium was home to the longest game in professional baseball at 33 innings over 3 days, the main selling point of the venue and an obvious fact for anyone who visited the stadium.
• A strange omission is that the author mentions Slater Mill Historic Site in Pawtucket, RI but does not mention Samuel Slater, who constructed the mill and brought textile manufacturing to the United States; Old Slater Mill Association, a non-profit organization that maintained the mill since 1923; or Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, which has contained the mill and other sites since 2016.
• The author describes Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor (BHC) as a Rhode Island entity. However, the organization spans both Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with its headquarters in Linwood, MA.
• The author briefly mentions the Museum of Work & Culture. He does not list its location in Woonsocket, RI or let readers know that the museum is part of the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS).

The number of oversights and errors in the passages describing this small region leads me to believe that hundreds of similar issues exist within the book. The writing is unclear whether the author has actual visited any of these locations. In fact, when conducting further research of select locations using local websites, I found many passages were almost word-for-word copies of the text.

While I can forgive passages of the book that are already outdated due to attraction closures during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (one of the saddest for me being the closure of the Whitehorse Trolley in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada) the problems in the book are many times more than I would expect from a National Geographic publication. Because of these issues, I cannot recommend 50 States 5000 Ideas as a reliable source. The beautiful layout and stunning pictures in the book make it perfect for a decorative stack on a video call background bookshelf or casual viewing, but serious travel research should be conducted elsewhere.

Abby Epplett’s Rating System

Experience: 6/10