American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Pursues for this generation the same themes as "Albion's Seed" did for the last ...although with considerably different details. Where "Albion's Seed" was largely about the pre-revolutionary period, a much longer span of years including the Civil War era as well as the present day is analyzed here. A book not of new research through primary sources, but rather of synthesis of other carefully chosen works of history around a theme few even imagined and almost none expressed quite this way. Specifically, the themes here are that the several cultures within the U.S. are more different from each other than quite a few nation-states, and that although the "Borderlanders" were a majority of the population, they were egregiously excluded from political power until the time of Andrew Jackson, and are still often thought of derogatorily. He tries pretty hard -and fairly successfully- to be even-handed. Nevertheless I managed to form the impression his personal tendencies were toward progressive causes and away from the Deep South. And he does say explicitly at one point "Since 1877 the driving force of American politics hasn't primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role. Ultimately the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom." Among other things, this history explains why Ohio is such an important swing state in presidential elections (different land ownership resulted in _three_ different "nations" settling inside a single state ...and in dis-contiguous areas). Although he doesn't explicitly cover it at all, it seemed clear to me from reading that both a large and growing population and economic might are keys to a culture being influential. He very briefly covers the apparently uncontroversial historical maxim that the original settling (or resettling) of an area often determines its culture for hundreds of years, even after both the original people and the original economy have largely vanished. Since there are currently very few pursuing this unfamiliar line of historical inquiry, he perforce paints with quite a broad brush. As a result, some of his details feel "half-baked", and once in a while at the edges there's a whopper that has trouble standing up to a few moments deep thought. U.S. history has become mostly New England history (can you imagine relating the mythology of the U.S. without mentioning Plymouth Rock?). What happened to all the other colonies, including the older one at Jamestown? He explains how the Tidewater culture centered on Virginia was very large and enormously influential through the early decades of the union, but ultimately was hemmed in by geography and ecology and shrank to not a whole lot more than an appendage to the Deep South. He explains how the original Georgia colony was overwhelmed by the economy of the Deep South (which was founded by immigrants from Barbados rather than from Europe) and disappeared into it. And he very briefly explains that the Florida explorations and colonies were originally tied to the Spanish empire and so largely lost to the U.S. He makes a convincing case that the odds were heavily stacked _against_ the very dissimilar "New England", "New Netherland", "Tidewater", and "Deep South" colonies allying to fight for independence and federate under the constitution; splintering of the union was a very real threat for much of the next century. He shows how the settling of the coastal areas of the west coast by immigrants who came by ship (many from New England) produced a culture quite different from the more interior areas of those same states that were settled by different immigrants who came overland. Genesis of "The Left Coast" cultural nation is one of the sketchiest parts of his book, and as one who lived in California for quite a while, I found it maddeningly oversimplified. Still, he's put forward a seemingly reasonable novel point of view that brings order to a lot of loose ends. He opines that although the cultures in the U.S. had to fit reasonably well into their local ecologies, most of them were not really determined by it. (I sometimes felt he actually underplayed some obvious ecological constraints.) The one glaring exception to U.S. cultures not being determined by ecology is the "Far West", whose dryness and vastness completely stymied all the cultures that attempted to expand into it. It ultimately was settled only by following the lead of large corporatist frameworks that could organize thousands of people and support them with pinpoint application of large amounts of capital, and is still dependent on the largesse of the federal government. He's young (not long out of grad school) and he makes his living writing books and articles, rather than as an academic historian, so he has a very fresh approach to everything. For example he explains that in the backcountry folks used "whiskey" as currency (coins were almost completely absent); the tax that prompted the "Whiskey Rebellion" was essentially a blow by the coastal elites against backcountry currency! He explicitly covers every bit of background, not assuming anything at all, so readers never feel like "something's missing". He unabashedly take firm sides on current controveries, for example stating the Civil War was clearly about slavery rather than states' rights. And he's not constrained by either the "conventional wisdom" or the need to publish only defensible interpretations. Without any qualification he refers to the "Far West" as an "internal colony". Often where an academician would remain silent in the face of ambiguous or conflicting primary sources, he'll say frankly what he reads "between the lines". For example he plainly states that the scheme of Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and others after the revolution to redeem federal debt certificates at full face value really was an outrageous and corrupt scheme, with much in common with the financial meltdown of 2008. He even opines (with some supporting evidence) that the "Founding Fathers" were slanted toward carefully circumscribed democracy and economic exploitation by elites. The emphasis here is on empirical description of the U.S., not on theory or polemics. There's almost nothing allowing comparison to other countries. So we're left with the vague notion the countries of North America are "atypical", but without any specifics or quantification or context. His speculations about possible future trends for the North American countries are restricted to a few pages in the last chapter and the Epilogue. Several things he says implicitly lead to the conclusion that the U.S. would have been better off if the South had been allowed to leave the Union quietly without a Civil War. On the other hand he explicitly states -using Canada as his example- that even without the South, encompassing several very different cultures would still be problematic, and the Union might ultimately shrink back in power and authority to little more than a federation of semi-independent states like the original confederation of 1781.

I think anyone who is interested in the public life of North America needs to read this book. It is extremely well-written, engrossing, and important to public debate. The first part traces the historical roots of the eleven nations of the northern 2/3 our continent. The argument is well-buttressed with historical observations, and ultimately is persuasive that there are indeed eleven nations within our country (12 if you count Miami, the capital of the Caribbean), it is persuasive about the characteristics of the nations and why they developed and spread the way they did. I accept pretty much everything in the first half of the book and consider it a great addition to my understanding of American history. The second half of the book traces modern developments and looks a bit into the future. It less persuasive but still worth the read, as it applies the eleven-nation concept to more modern times. Disclosure: I view myself as somewhat liberal in outlook with a somewhat libertarian flavor to it. I am an independent but I currently dislike the Republican party more than I dislike the Democratic party. I was born and raised in DC (which, as the author admits, is somewhat unique) and lived in the nation of Tidewater for 30 years. I moved to Pittsburgh in the nation of Midlands and have lived here for 30 years. Perhaps this explains the nagging feeling throughout the book that, despite the historical facts that buttress the arguments, there is a Yankee national bias to the book. Perhaps the frequent representation of the nation of Deep South as the fount of all evil tends to create this expression. Is there nothing about the Deep South that is good? I will leave that to others to answer. I will instead concentrate on some differences between Tidewater and Midlands that I have experienced, which makes me long for some aspects of Tidewater. Perhaps having attending the University of Virginia has warped my outlook, but so be it. The highway departments in both Pennsylvania (mostly Midlands) and Virginia (mostly Tidewater) are both known for their past corruption (though things may be better now). In the Pittsburgh area, while I was living here, Route 51 was paved by a corrupt contractor who not only got the bid through fraud but also used substandard paving so that the entire highway had to be repaved a year or so later. I don't think this kind of corruption happens in Virginia. A different kind of corruption happens (or happened) there. Contracts were awarded to those who had connections, and perhaps offered certain inducements to officials of the highway department. But paving with substandard materials? Simply not done. And, I remember once when I took a crew of folks visiting from Roanoke Virginia (in Tidewater) walking from the University of Pittsburgh to a restaurant in the student-slum area near the University. They were commenting on the amount of trash on the streets and sidewalks, and had to resist the urge to start picking it all up. Perhaps some of this is due to the Appalachian influence in Pittsburgh. In Tidewater, as a middle class developed, some of the principles of the old aristocracy took hold with the middle and even the lower classes, and even regardless of race. Despite being seen by some as a Yankee virtue, neatness, pride in one's houses and village and cities, a sense of responsibility for the land and the people is a core value in Tidewater and indeed in some of the Deep South. It's a sense of noblesse oblige handed down from the originally English aristocracy who originally ruled the land -- people like James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. If you hike the Appalachian Trail, you can see this in the care that goes into trail and shelter maintenance as you hike through Tidewater Virginia. Given these sorts of observations, I wish the MR. Woodard had expanded the work a bit, dealing a bit more with counterexamples to his arguments, accepting some and dismissing others. It would ultimately have been a bit more persuasive and enlightening. Regardless, is is a must-read. I will have my wife and 14-year-old daughter read it and then we will have a family book club discussing it.

This book covers the historical settlement of North America quite well. Many questions I had about the early colonial period were answered. Regional divisions are quite evident to folks with a set of eyes and any sense in their brain, yet US history books seem to claim a united 13 colonies devolved into two halves - a north and a south (simply over slavery), expanded into the wild west in the 1800s, and somehow became further divided into schisms in modern times. The history presented in the book is easy to read and ties everything together. 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.

Colin Woodard has written the story of North America that should be taught in school in place of the simplified, sanitized, nearly fictional versions created, like all national histories, for the purpose of welding disparate peoples into a single nation by convincing them they all share a common history. I just got it back from loaning to a friend and re-read it. Like other reviewers here I had read Joel Garreau's "Nine Nations" in the 1980s and more recently Kevin Phillips' "The Cousins Wars" and Dante Chinni's "Patchwork Nation". They were full of interesting information, but Nine Nations and Patchwork Nation didn't address the origins or persistence of the notable regional differences among North Americans. I think Woodard's main thesis is that these regional cultures left their marks so deeply that we are no longer consciously aware of them, and should be. My experience living and working in several of these "nations" indicates that the regional differences do persist, though national media and advertising have masked them. Reading "American Nations" I felt the pieces falling into place. I am undecided on the question of just how valid the thesis of eleven rival nations is as political science, but it makes for a fine explication of our history. And as cultural anthropology it provides the same level of explanatory power for understanding our cultural differences that the theory of evolution provided for understanding biology, or that the theory of plate tectonics did for understanding planetary-scale geologic processes. Just as those two sciences could not advance beyond the observational phase without a theoretical framework, this third dimension of historical immigration patterns transforms a two-dimensional hodgepodge of cultural observations into a meaningful three-dimensional portrait far more illuminating than the usual North-South analysis. The map on the "American Nations" cover showed me that I grew up roughly where the Deep South, Appalachia, and El Norte meet in eastern Texas. We said we were "Scotch-Irish" but seemed to have no knowledge of or interest in how we came to be there, nor did I ever know anyone who was aware that there were early Spanish missions in the pine woods of East Texas or that there had been a large Cherokee village not four miles from my home. Later I learned that my own family had entered the U.S. in South Carolina from Barbados in the 1680s; little is known about them except that they were poor whites, so now we know there is a good chance they were indentured servants to Barbadian slave lords. How many Americans know the Deep South was founded at Charleston by migrants from Barbados? I never did. I had always lumped Tidewater, Appalachia, and the Deep South as "the South", but distinguishing them by origin explains a lot. Now I have some insight into features of my county that have puzzled me for decades: why the tiny community where I attended school in the 1950s and 60s was clustered around its original plantation house, Cumberland Presbyterian church, and cotton fields (it was founded by a slave-holding family from Savannah, Georgia in the 1840s or 50s); why my neighbors had such casual contempt for blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Indians, Catholics, Chinese, and all other foreigners; why Ku Klux Klan actions were still fresh in older folks' memories; why blacks lived either in their own parts of town literally across the tracks or entirely separately in their own towns or isolated communities tucked away in the woods; why my parents were so puzzled that "our Negroes" seemed dissatisfied with our hand-me-down clothes and an occasional pig (I recall puzzled discussions of "What do they want?" implying lack of gratitude); why some neighbors said "Bide a wee" for "stay a while" or occasionally exclaimed "Gott in himmel!" but otherwise spoke in Texas drawl; why hillfolk in remote cabins in the woods practiced subsistence hunting using antique Springfield and Henry rifles, had a near-religious devotion to one-shot kills and complete disregard for hunting season and licenses, and distilled their own liquor (Appalachians for sure!); why there was a deeply ingrained presumption that gentlemen rode horses and peasants walked, so any poor farmer that came into oil money bought horses immediately (Deep South cavaliers influence); why there was hardly any familiarity with or emphasis on attending college, and disdain for the (rare) "know it all college boy" (Appalachian ignorance and apathy influenced by Deep South resistance to education for the masses); why employers referred to employees as "hands"; why our relatives in far southwest Texas seemed to us to live in a different country (they did - El Norte), while relatives in Tennessee and business associates in Mississippi seemed to come from an earlier and more violent time; why Cajuns in south Louisiana and southeast Texas seemed like such an anomaly in the Deep South in their Catholicism and complete disregard of racial boundaries (New France egalitarianism); maybe even why some blacks in East Texas practiced a strange mixture of Southern Baptist services and voodoo lore - one local black church was even named the Voodoo Baptist Church, and the pastor roamed the area on foot wearing an animal skin cape and carrying a long shepherd's staff (West Africa via the West Indies). Does any of this sound like growing up in Michigan? Have you lived in a state with a state religion? Texas has one, best characterized as southernbaptistfootball. Recognition that the region is essentially Appalachia with a strong Deep Southern influence and only faint traces of Spanish and Indian influence remaining provides the key to unlock all those scattered observations made as an ignorant but curious youth. Knowing the origins of Yankeedom, the Midlands, Tidewater, and the cavalier South even sheds light on why North Dakotans and Minnesotans, coastal Northern Californians, Oregonians, Washingtonians, and my in-laws in Evanston, Illinois are so similar to New England Yankees, while my prospective in-laws in northern Virginia were deeply interested in our "bloodlines". Appalachia and the Deep South were of particular interest to me, but the story of the founding and migrations of El Norte, New England, New Netherland, New France, the Midlands, Tidewater, the Far West, the Left Coast, and more recently the founding of the Canadian First Nation are completely fascinating and illuminating, and leave me embarrassed at how much is new to me. (Woodard could've made it an even dozen by including New Sweden, a Swedish colony along the Delaware River in parts of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania from 1638 to 1655! I guess it didn't leave enough of a cultural mark.) Lastly, I did not think Woodard unfairly favored the Yankees; his description showed the harsh, violent, and meddlesome parts of their Puritan cultural heritage along with the elements we still cherish (for much more detail see Fischer's "Albion's Seed"). The key difference is that Yankees changed with the times. Nor did I take the epilogue as an unwelcome interjection of personal opinion. I read it as unflinching commentary that grappled with unpleasant realities and made some educated extrapolations regarding possible futures for the U.S. and North America. Woodard is not the first to speculate along these lines of fracture, as he notes. And I have made the same comments on "the Baptist equivalent of sharia law" since the conservative coup of the Southern Baptist Convention in the mid-1990s. The Deep South has been a reluctant participant in the U.S. federation and has routinely made threats to withdraw since the Articles of Confederation days; in the 2010 mid-term election we again heard southern politicians talk of secession. That would be either puzzling or shocking without this deep background. Can a nation-state cobbled together from Dutch, Spanish, French, and multiple waves of incompatible English colonists, along with unwilling Indians and Africans, really hold together for another 200 years? Maybe a mutual divorce based on irreconcilable differences would eventually result in more compatible second marriages for all or even decisions that they prefer to go it alone. And really lastly - I've enjoyed and learned nearly as much from the reviewers and commenters here as from the book.

Here is the story of the regional cultural history of the USA. For the first time, I get us. We do not understand each other because we have 11 different kinds of value systems, different psychological DNAs. Probably it can be a good start to understand our own selves in terms of context, origins, belief systems, values. Woodard needs (for his next update) to add an appendix in which he summarizes, maybe in bullet form, each region / nation as to its values, orgins, geographic spread, alliances and why, enmities and why. I am having to make my own. Even with all that, the writing is clean, clear, economical and understandable. You just need to take a few breathers while your mind unboggles itself. This perspective is as important, authentic, insightful and meaningful -- seminal, actually -- as Howard Zinn's in a different way. I am waiting for the 2025 book and going to read his everything else now. He does not waste a single word and not a minute of my time.

Over the years there have been several books and studies available putting forth the concept that American; actually all of North America, is actually a number of different nations which are more or less united. The number of these nations differs, depending upon a given author’s research. Some of these works have been good, others bad and others down right ugly. The book being reviewed here, American Nations, in my opinion is probably the best of the lot and for me makes the most sense. Now that does not mean that I agree absolutely with every thing the author has to say. That would be a sad and silly mistake. But that being said, Woodard does present some very logical reasons why we are the way we are and loads the reader with wonderful historical facts that most certainly not taught in your average high school history course. Mingled with his premise of there actually being eleven nations currently present is a dire warning of which we should all take heed. It also, in my mind, answers many questions as to why we are such a culturally and politically divided nation at this present time. Now I am not a cultural anthropologist nor have I made a dedicated study of the subject. I have though lived in each and every area addressed in this book for extended periods of time and have family members living in these areas as I write this. Folks, for the most part the author are pretty well spot on as to his comments and observations. I myself my not have worded some of these observations the author has documented quite has harshly, but there is never the less great truth in what he writes...for the most part. Now I am neither a ‘conservative’ nor am I a ‘liberal.’ Like most people I am pretty much a mixture; depending upon the subject but I simply admit it. Historical facts and events that you can observe first hand yourself over seven or more decades simply do not lie. Of course as I said in the beginning, each individual should read and study this subject using other sources...just to be sure they have as large an overview as possible. This book is very well researched and like other reviewers here, I must admit that more or less woke me up to many factors present today that I have more or less ignored. It also reinforced my amazement that we actually managed to become a more or less unified country. History, culture and religion, along with geography were most certainly against us as well as Canada and Mexico. This is one of those books that we all should read and contemplate. Weather the author is right or wrong is rather moot in many ways. The strength of this book is that it gives the reader food for thought and may open windows to the mind that the reader never realized existed. This is one of those books that I would love to see offered to each H.S. Senor to be read before graduation. I read this on the Kindle version. I would love to have had provided a set of progressive maps and the author presented his historical story...it would have been a great help. I was constantly digging through a large U.S. map I have on hand here attempting to track the author’s progress. Now as to the various theories and observations the author has made – I will leave the pontifications to others here who are much more qualified than I am to spout their vast reservoir of knowledge...bless their hearts. Don Blankenship The Ozarks

I highly recommend this book, but I'm submitting a three-star review based on the book's very weak and undisciplined finish. I thought the first two-thirds of the book provided a well-documented and well-thought-out presentation of America's regional differences and the history behind those differences. It was truly enlightening, even for an historian like myself. When writing the last third, however, the author clearly lost his objective discipline. Whereas the first two-thirds were well-reasoned and well-supported, the last third devolved into stereotypes and generalities, and contained more than a few downright errors, particularly concerning the modern Deep South and Greater Appalachia. I am an unapologetic Left Coaster with clear leanings toward activist Yankeeism, but even I was able to see Mr. Woodard's clear bias in the last third of the book. I found myself cringing more than a few times at the outright inaccuracies contained in his presentation of the modern South. I could list at least a half-dozen factual errors in his presentation concerning the practice and influence of Evangelical Christianity in the Bible Belt, for instance, but would rather not bog down this review with nit-picking. It would be great if Mr. Woodard could write a revised edition where he would exercise the same historical discipline in the last third of the book that he did for the first two-thirds. Such a presentation would truly be worthy of five stars. I still feel that this book is very much worth reading, but readers should approach the last third with a skeptical eye.

Incredible content. The author compiled a lifetime of research from official documents, land grants and deeds, letters, diaries, newspapers, and on. Footnotes and the huge bibliography are priceless. I learned more about the REAL history of the US from this book than I did in all the "sanitized" history I was fed in my 20 school years. The author explains US history in chronological order from the first colonizations of the southwest (El Norte) by the Spanish (!). He gives special attention as to how the Native Americans were differently treated by each of the different colonizing Europeans. He also spends some time discussing our history as it intertwines with Canada. (Nova Scotia was almost the 14th colony?) Early US history was NOT dominated by only William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and the glamorous players of textbooks, but the countries, concepts, and actions they represented or caused to happen. Very factual, with some surprises. For example, I never knew that the Electoral College came BEFORE "one man one vote", because the rich, educated folks who wrote the Articles of Confederation and subsequently the Constitution didn't want the "filthy, uneducated rabble" of lesser populated colonies to actually be able to determine who the president of the United States turned out to be. (My soapbox: How about we get rid of the Electoral College?) I must admit that when I first opened to the introduction I almost threw the book away, because rabid Tea Party advocate, Glenn Beck, was mentioned in the first sentence--I thought, "Oh crap, what have I purchased?" I gave the book a try anyway, and found it not only intriguing, revealing, and addicting, but "fair in reporting" all the way across the board. As the book progresses the players get harder to track. In my limited time, I have been reading for three weeks and have only gotten to the Civil War (very enlightening on why "who" was on "which side". I will definitely have to read it again--maybe make a chart or two and some notes on the author's map. Plus there are a few details that I hope to research in the future, for example, how did George Washington really become President? I'm sure the extensive bibliography will help me find the answer. Rereading the book and researching items that have piqued my curiosity will be a PLEASURE. EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!