With all the recent media attention over efforts by some southern Californians to break off from their northern neighbors and create the 51st state, one might think that the idea of states splitting up—or actually seceding from the union outright—is something that hasn’t been discussed since the Civil War.

But that’s not the case at all. As TAC contributor Bill Kauffman pointed out in this piece from 2005, there are “at least 28 U.S. secessionist movements active everywhere from those dubious Cold War states of Alaska and Hawaii to New York City—site of Norman Mailer’s prophetically pro-secession 1969 mayoralty campaign—to the states of the Confederacy, with their League of the South, and up to the felicitously named State of Jefferson in northern California and southern Oregon. America has gone fission.”

Make that 29, now that the Riverside County Board has approved a proposal that would look into the idea of splitting off from California.

Meanwhile, a secessionist group in Texas has begun printing its own currency. And let’s not forget Texas Governor Rick Perry’s comments in 2009 about how Texas had the right to secede from the union.

Talk of secession—whether it’s from other states or the nation as a whole—might not be very popular, but it’s certainly not uncommon.