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American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America Paperback – September 25, 2012
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Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who in this presidential election year, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America
According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateSeptember 25, 2012
- Dimensions5.52 x 0.81 x 8.39 inches
- ISBN-109780143122029
- ISBN-13978-0143122029
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- ASIN : 0143122029
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 25, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780143122029
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143122029
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.52 x 0.81 x 8.39 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #9,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Historical Geography
- #6 in Human Geography (Books)
- #25 in Native American History (Books)
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About the author

Colin Woodard, an award-winning author and journalist, is State & National Affairs Writer for The Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, a contributing editor at Politico, and a longtime correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Newsweek, The Guardian, Bloomberg View, Washington Monthly and dozens of other national and international publications. A native of Maine, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and seven continents, and lived for five years in Eastern Europe during and after the collapse of communism. At the Press Herald he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
His fourth book, "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America", is a Wall Street Journal bestseller that was named a Best Book of 2011 by the editors of The New Republic and the Globalist and won the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Non-Fiction. "The Republic of Pirates", a definitive biography of Blackbeard, Sam Bellamy, and other members of the most famous pirate gang in history, is a New York Times bestseller and was the basis of the 2014 NBC drama "Crossbones", starring John Malkovich. His latest is "Union: The Struggle to Forge a Story of United States Identity" (Viking Press, June 2020), which was named a Christian Science Monitor Book of the Year.
He is also the author of "American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good", which was a finalist for the 2016 Chautauqua Prize and won the 2016 Maine Literary Prize for Non-fiction; the New England bestseller "The Lobster Coast", a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine; "Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas", a narrative non-fiction account of the deterioration of the world's oceans.
A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Midcoast Maine.
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In summary this is what the book says: New Englanders and later Great Lake people were Anglo Saxon Protestant utopians, mostly of the Puritan persuasion, who though meddling in everyone else's affairs, mean well and have always valued education as a sign of status. New Netherland is basically greater New York City, which due to its size, and profit-first mindset, gave it a unique immigrant identity, largely of Dutch-reform Calvinists at first, and just about every group imaginable thereafter. Their money-first mentality also fueled the American end of the slave trade, as many were shipped to NYC and even stayed there on the many farms in the area. Midlanders are a heterogeneous blend of people Quakers liked - the "default" American. Appalachians were a rare group that clashed with tolerant Quakers of Philadelphia, and fled to the hills before spreading from coast to coast as rugged pioneer people. Tidewater cavaliers were the first American aristocracy, based in disinherited Normans scions from the old country, and produced the great founders like Washington and Jefferson. The book says were slave owners but genuinely better people (in the author's mind perhaps) than their Deep Southern Norman cousins that at least valued education in their slave-based agrarian lifestyle. Deep Southerners are described as the bane of America pretty much. Hardcore slave owners that defended their "rights" to treat people as owned livestock, and somehow managed to fend off numerous rebellions in spite of being a minority in the region they ruled over. They liked to dance in balls and sit on their rockers drinking tea while watching their "property" sweat it out in the field, and carried the same mentality to their Bible Belt conservative politics of today.
Other areas are described, though not really part of the original British colonies. New France is really the first serious colonization project of Northwest Europeans in North America after Columbus. It is said to be pretty much the same as today's Quebec, yet somehow Acadians found their way down to Louisiana in some unusual satellite colony that largely absorbed into the Deep South after the Louisiana Purchase. The Left Coast was settled by Puritan Yankees via boat, with only San Francisco area keeping some names from earlier Spanish "Indian conversion" missions and a few architectural motifs. They didn't have much time before some Appalachian ruffians of other sorts came over during the Gold Rush. The Wild West was really land no individual farmer could tame, and needed great colonization efforts by mining and railroad corporations. I guess the Mormons were a colonization corporation too. El Norte was the first European settlement of North America after Columbus. They settled the Gulf and the rugged deserts along the Rio Grande and up to Pueblo, Colorado. They were largely isolated from the core of Aztec-Spaniard Mexico City, and were a rugged rural people who brought us the cowboy culture (BTW Young Guns is a decent movie depicting how "frontier hillbilly" Appalachian and El Norte culture merged in New Mexico).
The area covered is pretty extensive, but some areas are forgotten or merged with areas they have little in common with. One notable example - that he does mention to his defense - is the Mormon settlement of Utah.
Mormons were as New Englander as they come, but allegations of sorcery and witchcraft (remember Salem?) led them to flee to the Cleveland area of Ohio. Persecution there was more based in financial failings of Joseph Smith's bank in a Jacksonian time dominated by Appalachian Borderlanders. (Jackson himself had a history with banks - namely fighting off big European ones.) Anyway next stop was the area bordering Indian Territory in present-day Independence, Missouri. Actually this area was settled simultaneously with Kirtland, Ohio, but Joseph Smith did not have the main group there. Joseph Smith marched "Zion's Camp" over there when the Appalachian-based frontiersmen there took offense to their meddling "Yankee" and utopian ways. (Mormons claimed it was the site of New Jerusalem, a city for the new Millennium, which obviously chaffed against the other settlers). After a jail stay in "Liberty" of all cities, Smith took his fledgling faith to Illinois to establish a city then on par with Chicago. Within half a decade it was over 12K and flourishing. The city was in the buffer zone between Yankeedom and Appalachia, called Midlander in the book. Again trouble arose - this time with the issue of church vs. state and freedom of the press. When Joseph Smith had an anti-Mormon press in town torn down as a "nuisance", this led to more mobs of haters and finally Smith's execution in jail from a face-painted mob. While Yankee in origin, Smith and his associates had veered quite a bit from the increasingly secular and civil liberty-loving mindset of the Northern states.
While all this was going on in America, converts were being drawn in from around the country. Mormonism was a heavily-proselyting faith that swole in numbers in the first few decades from the original six members in New York. One of my ancestors came to Nauvoo from the East Tennessee Smokey Mountains of all places. (another ancestor of mine being Brigham Young himself). England was the first European country to be heavily tracted, with the first ward in Europe in Preston. Many Englanders and British sailed to "Zion" in the 1830s and 40s before the fall of Nauvoo, so the English ancestry of many Utahns cited in the book was not colonial or New Englander - it was an entirely new batch of Victorian "Brits" (whom Charles Dickens once positively noted at the port before as they were leaving for America.) These people, along with converted people across the country, joined the wagon trains westward for one of the first massive migrations across America in 1847. While they stopped near present-day Omaha along the way, the final destination was a valley that represents a 180-degree rotation of the ancient Holy Land, with a fresh-water "Sea of Galilee" (Utah Lake) pouring upwards into a salty "dead sea" (Great Salt Lake). I think Brigham Young recognized these features (the river was even named Jordan), along with the desert climate of the valley and said "This is the right place". The rest is Utah history as we know it, and that of those "strange polygamous Mormons".
But it doesn't stop at Utah. The Mormon Battalion was an advance scouting group that helped map out the Southwest during the Mexican War. They also helped found San Diego and some members were in California during the first gold discovery. They have a substantial influence in California's, Idaho's, Nevada's, and Arizona's history. Deseret was originally proposed to be a megastate encompassing all of the Mormon colonies - including San Bernaardino, CA, Las Vegas, Mesa, AZ, western Idaho, and the Wasatch Front. This demand and polygamy are two main reasons why it took so long for them to obtain statehood (over 40 years).
In spite of the Utah War, rejected state demands, church/state issues, and the polygamy imprisonments, they still cooperated with the federal government and corporations in creating the great railroads that spanned the country, and mining the Rocky Mountains. In this way they did fit into the Far West. They also surprisingly have influence in outlaw legend with Butch Cassidy, and the high stakes world of modern corporate Vegas with Howard Hughes' "Mormon Mafia". Mormon culture has always been unique from Yankeedom, the left coast and the old west, even though it has pieces in common with all these. I think the biggest points of conflict have been church and state, living revelation, polygamy (which no other American nation liked) and what many see as a "forbidden" mixture of science and theology/religion. Just look at the recent snubbings by the Left Coast Pac-12 conference of the Mormon BYU. They would rather take BYU's secularized older sister, the University of Deseret...I mean Utah instead (the school that the previous two Mormon prophets attended). Both however were founded by Brigham Young for basically the same reason - educate "the Saints" while maintaining the Latter Day Saint faith.
So yeah they have Yankee focus on education and social betterment, an almost Appalachian pioneer mindset of do it yourself (minus the moonshine), and a corporate Far West identity. But the restoration of ancient cultures, namely the Anglo Saxon tribe hierarchy coupled with Biblical to ancient Israel's top-down government that Moses set up (Stakes and wards), a restoration of ancient temple worship (which Templars tried but couldn't get all the pieces together), and the fact that Salt Lake City and Provo are Meccas of Mormon converts worldwide justifies a unique cultural grouping. Even non-Mormons in heavily Mormon states like Nevada, Arizona and Idaho inherit some of the Mormon influences like the wide street grid, and Mormons are senators, governors and congresspeople in those states. There are anti-Mormons in these states, but same goes for the epicenter of Salt Lake City, which is only like 40% Mormon. It could be argued anti-Mormonism and Jack-Mormonism is a culture in and of itself, and even part of the greater Mormon culture (yin and yang). It has followed the culture wherever it went, yet somehow manages to coexist. Some like the friendly and safe Mormon atmosphere while paradoxically complaining about their strict moral laws and government influence. That's enough about the Mormon culture. (While not a Mormon historian, I know a bit about its history just growing up in the faith.) Now on to other parts of the book.
The author also leaves out the substantial French influence in the settlement of Mississippi River and Great Lake cities like St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago. Why are there still places and universities in those cities named after French people like Marquette, Champaign, LaSalle or DePaul? This would have been a good tie-in between the contrasting Cajun culture and the Quebecois culture. The Cajun settlement was not really as isolated as the book claims. The French followed a settlement path down the St. Lawrence into the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi. Also Mobile and Biloxi are equally French in their origins as cities as New Orleans and Baton Rouge are. The reality is that the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, which weakened a vast colonization of the American interior. Before that there was heavy colonization. It was not neglected territory as much as it was territory that became an excessive expense with war costs and management changes. This was purchased in the "Louisiana Purchase". With the inclusion of "El Norte" as a significant Catholic/Romance culture in North America, in spite of the fact that states like Arizona, Southern California and New Mexico are heavily anglicized today, why leave out the interior culture influence of the fur traders and settlers of the Louisiana Purchase portion of the United States?
The deep south characterization is, as other reviewers said, biased. I liked the first two thirds, up to the turn of the 20th century, but the last third seems to follow the liberal/Yankee line of "all southerners are backwards people clinging on to superstitions and social casting of feudal times, ruled by 'massas' in white hats and bow-ties". But somehow the fact that the South has been a center for technological development since New Deal and World War 2 gets omitted. Those Tennessee "hillbillies" have Oak Ridge, the "cotton pickers" in Northern Alabama have Redstone Arsenal, Cummings Research Park and Marshall Space Flight Center, the "crackers" on the Central Florida coast have Cape Canaveral, the "cowboys" of Houston have NASA command center, the "tarheels" in North Carolina have Research Triangle Park, and greater Atlanta is home to many high tech industries. The "uneducated" south is also responsible for some of the first and highest-caliber public universities in the country - Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Georgia Tech, as well as group of prestigious "southern ivy" or "magnolia" group including private schools like Rice, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Southern Methodist, Tulane, Duke, Miami and Emory.
The geographical, political, and cultural divides between the North and South have been fairly well defined by the "Mason-Dixon Line" --- approximately the line of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers. Indeed states like Kentucky and Maryland are called "Border States" as if they were on an international frontier. And of course a military frontier DID materialize between the North and South when the Southern sub-nation attempted to assert its sovereignty during the Civil War.
This great divide between the Northern and Southern sub-nations continues to this day. I've read commentaries from foreigners who explain the politics of the United States as consisting of a struggle for dominance between the Northern and Southern sub-nations. We Americans refer to this as the "Red State / Blue State" divide. So the idea of the USA consisting of two sub-nations is well established.
The question this book addresses is whether it makes sense to subdivide the United States into MORE THAN TWO subnational entities. Others have asked this question before. Joel Garreau wrote about it in 1981 in his book THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA. I read NINE NATIONS then and concluded that it was partially valid in an economic sense, i.e. relatively more Westerners earn their livelihoods from mining, relatively more people on the Great Plains earn their living from growing wheat and corn and livestock, and relatively more Northerners earn their living from Industry. So from that perspective there are arguably nine economic nations in North America. But Garreau did not convince me that there are more than two political sub-nations inside the USA.
I have to say that this book doesn't convince me either. The historical context presented in the book seems to me to be stretched a bit, for example in portraying the Civil War as alliances between federations of many submerged "nations" instead of just being a war between the USA and CSA. Woodard writes:
==================================
While Midlanders [people living in the "Lower North" States of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois] voted with their Yankee neighbors, they had no desire to be governed by them. Faced with the possibility of a national dissolution, most Midland political and opinion leaders hoped to join the Appalachian-controlled states to create a Central Confederacy stretching from New Jersey to Arkansas. The proposed nation would serve as a neutral buffer area between Yankeedom and the Deep South, preventing the antagonists from going to war with each other.
==================================
I think it's safe to say that the author's assertion that "most" Midland political and opinion leaders favored forming a Central Confederacy is an overstatement. I've studied this subject intensively and don't know of ANY "Midland political and opinion leaders" of any substance who hoped to form a Central Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, the two most prominent "Midlanders" of the Civil War era, never discussed it. Nor did anybody of substance in the South. The question came down to, "Who do we fight for, the Union or Confederacy?" There wasn't any realistic prospect of carving out alternative third-party nations.
There are many other over-simplifications that lead me to believe that the author's arguments postulating more than two sub-nations inside the USA are forced. The central premise of the book does NOT ring true:
=============
America's most essential and abiding divisions are not between red states and blue states, conservatives and liberals, capital and labor, blacks and whites, the faithful and the secular. Rather, our divisions stem from this fact: the United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another.
=============
Were that premise true, political campaigns would be tailored along subnational lines with candidates appealing to quasi-nationalistic "(Yankee, Southern, Midwestern, Western) Pride." In truth political campaigns ARE tailored along conservative/liberal, labor/capital, black/white (not so much anymore, fortunately), and faithful/secular. For example, the political parties appeal to the ECONOMIC interests of business owners and factory workers in Michigan, Alabama, and California, not to their interests as separate nationalities. The ONLY political campaign that was ever organized along subnationalistic lines was that of 1860 that led directly to Civil War. All modern political discussions in the United States have been about economics and foreign policy, and nothing to do with nationalistic ambitions of our regions.
On that basis I would say the fundamental premise of the book is overstated. In fact the author takes the theory of regional differences to extremes by portraying a Deep South populated by Neanderthals with Bibles while the author's Northeastern homeland is said to be inhabited by noble Yankees desiring to "civilize the world." The other theoretical "American nations" are placed in a kind of historical purgatory between these extremes.
Also, in response to comments that came after my review, let me add that the "nations" that the author postulates have highly unconventional boundaries.
1. The "nation" the author calls "Greater Appalachia" is stretched to include such unlikely places such as Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis; and Dallas, Texas. Do any of these places really have a "nationality" bond with a real Appalachian town, like Charleston, West Virginia? I know the author's argument is that the FIRST WHITE settlers into these places MAY have been mountain men. But a lot has happened in Columbus and Indy and Dallas since the first hillbilly walked into town 200 years ago, if indeed any did. In truth the first white settlers in the American Midwest were not Appalachian hillbillies but French Canadians. So why aren't they the dominant "nation" if the author's thesis of "first settlement" priority is valid?
2. The author also postulates that the southern parts of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba are part of the same nation as the American Midlands. This is highly contrary to conventional wisdom that Canada is a distinct nationality from the USA in regards to government, politics, dialect, ethnicity, and settlement.
3. Also, based on the map of the "nations" the author doesn't appear to know that French Canada extends several hundred miles across Northern Ontario (Franco Ontario) and does not stop at the Ontario border as the author's "nationality" map shows. In the author's map French-Canadian towns like Kapuskasing, Ontario are lumped into the same Midlands "nation" as Philadelphia, PA. For that matter so is Amarillo, Texas. The author includes Amarillo, Philly, and part of French Canada in the same "Midlands" nation, but places Amarillo and Dallas in different nations!
The author bends history around his notion that our foreign policy depends upon which "nationality" group controls the government at any particular time. His notion is that American wars of aggression against other nations occur when Southerners dominate:
================================
U.S. foreign policy has shown a clear national pattern for the past two centuries. Since 1812, the anti-interventionist, anti-imperial Yankees have squared off against the bellicose, unilateralist hawks in the Deep South and Tidewater.
================================
The author tells us that President Woodrow Wilson, who he characterizes as a "Southern" President (despite Wilson serving as Governor of New Jersey), took us to war with Germany in 1917 because Southerners allegedly thought that "God had endorsed the war." He doesn't mention that we went to war because the Germans killed American passengers in sinking the Lusitania and asked Mexico to invade the USA as their ally.
In reality, our global military and economic reach resulted primarily from policies advocated by Northeasterners. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the father of the modern American Navy as an instrument of maintaining an American Empire and waging offensive wars in Europe and Asia, was a New Yorker. President Grover Cleveland of New York and Secretary of State Richard Olney of Massachusetts pushed us to the brink of war in the 1890s over a "Monroe Doctrine" issue regarding British encroachment in Venezuela. President William McKinley of Ohio took us into the Spanish-American War in 1898. President Teddy Roosevelt of New York ordered the U.S. Navy to blockade Panama when he wanted to separate it from Colombia in order to build the Panama Canal.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York orchestrated our entry into WWII, and President John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts committed us to South Vietnam.
None of these Presidents were "bellicose, unilateralist hawks in the Deep South and Tidewater." More to the point, the entire nation was involved in declaring and fighting these wars. They were not orchestrated by belligerent "subnations" out on a lark for military adventures. When we finally did elect a "Deep South" President we got Jimmy Carter, the antithesis of the author's stereotype of the ignorant, chauvinistic, warmongering Southerner.
There are many other unconventional assumptions in the author's definition of "nations" both in terms of boundaries and historical interpretations. However, the book is definitely thought-provoking. I'd encourage readers to enjoy it and form their own opinions, while understanding that the author is liberally interpreting American history in order to align it with his thesis. With that caveat in mind, I believe everyone with a professional or casual interest in American history will enjoy the read.
The value the book really had for me was in reminding me of what a stupendous accomplishment our ancestors achieved of creating ONE nation across the heart of North America. When we finally did fight the Civil War, the nationalism of the original Union had been matured sufficiently to maintain the nation as one. Many of our leaders from Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, to Lincoln, and on down to modern times have worked relentlessly to insure that we will remain one nation. Although Woodard may overstate the impact of regional differences, he does open a window on an interesting topic.
Btw. toward the end of this book Woodard digresses into politics. He states his view that the United States may unravel into separate sovereignties along his theoretical eleven nationality lines because he alleges that most of the country feels endangered by Southern Whites who he says are hell-bent on imposing "the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law on everyone else." Presumably the rest of the country will opt out of the United States before being forcibly dunked into the figurative baptismal pool by Woodard's Southern boogeymen.
I just read Conservative activist Pat Buchanan's book SUICIDE OF A SUPERPOWER: WILL AMERICAN SURVIVE TO 2025? Buchanan thinks we're going to disintegrate for the opposite reason --- because we don't have ENOUGH White people with religious spirit left to hold the country together!
Perhaps we should all just chill out and be what we're supposed to be --- a United States of tolerant Americans who respect our fellow countrymen regardless of their religious or political party affiliations or what part of the country they happen to live in.
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One thing the author should have done is better fact checking. While most of the history is factual, there are some glaring errors. For example, the author puts Donegal PA on the Great Wagon Road -- a 115 mile mistake. The Great Wagon Road did not go this far west. Another glaring error is erroneous comparison of the early relationship between the thirteen original states to the relationship of nations in the European Union. The author is way off the mark on this and obviously did not study the way the European Union is set up but just made assumptions.
But, the author's overall goal of elucidating the regional characteristics of the USA is well served.
However, this is a hard recommend and builds upon previous scholarship such as Albion's Seed









