Fun fact: the US Constitution is dated "year of our lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth"
There was some effort to start dating things with year 0 being 1776 and this line is almost always left off of transcripts of the Constitution.
@valleyforge a lot of state boundaries are referenced to degrees longitude west of DC, from before everyone gave up their weird nationalistic need to make themselves the centre of the world and just accepted Greenwich would remain the standard
@khird that might be more practical. Its hard to physically measure over oceans before satellites
@valleyforge I dunno about that. By the time the US was expanding westward, sextants and marine chronometers were sufficiently accurate to get pretty accurate fixes, so the DC-London offset would've been well established. It's hard to see a practical benefit from subtracting that offset from all the longitudes to rebase them against the national capital.
On the other hand, the idea of time zones was still fairly new, influenced by the railways. Prior to that, each town set its own clock, and the idea of having an accurate clock time away from cities didn't exist - you could accurately measure that some event occurred a certain time after another, but it wasn't really meaningful to speak of N o'clock in rural areas. So the benefits of being on the same standard as the rest of the English-speaking world would also have been less obvious than they are today.
