Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts, in particular, thought that geography was destiny. Montesquieu had back in the Eighteenth Century said, quite correctly, that temperate climates allowed nations to prosper. Europe and China do better than sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonian Brazil. Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts fully thought that geography was destiny. De Tocqeville thought that the small steads in New England was the result of the hilly and rocky terrain, while large plantations flourished in the South because of the flat turrain. Motley thought that the Lowlands resulted from a swampy land whose water had ever to be contested through dikes. In the Nineteen Fifties, historians said that the United States prospered because it's fields and wheatlands were so fertile There is an alternative example. It is the culture and its social structure that make a nation prosperous. The United States did well because it had a genius for government. The Northwest Ordinance, which predated the Constitution, treated new territories as places to become new and equal states rather than subordinated territories. The Constitution set up a system of government that has endured for more than two hundred years despite the fact that it is rife with its division between Northern and Southern States. America has the internet and its television networks across time zones and its climates and so you are everywhere at once, so long as you have electronics. I wanted to test out the experiences of geography and the other things by looking at Utah, the place in which I have recently settled.