{"id":5550,"date":"2016-04-14T06:56:41","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T10:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5550"},"modified":"2016-06-08T07:36:49","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T11:36:49","slug":"american-nations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5550","title":{"rendered":"****American Nations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5551\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/upinarms_map_large_converted.jpg?resize=584%2C398\" alt=\"American Nations, map\" width=\"584\" height=\"398\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/upinarms_map_large_converted.jpg?w=587&amp;ssl=1 587w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/upinarms_map_large_converted.jpg?resize=150%2C102&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/upinarms_map_large_converted.jpg?resize=300%2C204&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/upinarms_map_large_converted.jpg?resize=440%2C300&amp;ssl=1 440w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinwoodard.com\/\">By Colin Woodard<\/a> \u2013 This 2011 book\u2014a pick of my book club\u2014is a thought-provoking analysis of the different cultural strains, mostly organized along geographic lines, that make up what author Sarah Vowell calls \u201cthe (somewhat) United States.\u201d Woodard\u2019s subtitle is \u201ca history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America.\u201d Many of those rivalries, which date to our earliest history, well before the Revolutionary War, have been amplified, not erased, by subsequent events, and help to explain some of the political schisms we see today.<\/p>\n<p>The answer to a frustrated electorate\u2019s \u201cWhy can\u2019t our politicians (and voters) ever agree on anything?\u201d is partly that they never did. Of course, aggregate data hide a lot of individual differences, and none of the characterizations Woodard has developed for his eleven regions describe every individual living there, just the region\u2019s general cultural tendencies. Some of his regions cross over into Canada and Mexico too.<\/p>\n<p>The regions, which he says \u201chave been hiding in plain sight throughout our history,\u201d are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Yankeedom<\/strong> began as a \u201creligious utopia in the New England wilderness.\u201d Those early colonies emphasized education, local political control, and efforts aimed at the greater good of the community.<\/li>\n<li><strong>New Netherland<\/strong> laid down the cultural underpinnings of greater New York City; a trading society that was multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and committed to freedom of inquiry. Its precepts were memorialized in the Bill of Rights.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Midlands<\/strong>, founded by English Quakers and organized around the middle class people predominantly of German background and moderate political opinions who don\u2019t welcome government intrusion.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tidewater<\/strong> catered to conservative aristocratic elites who were gentleman farmers, strong on respect for authority and dependent on slave labor. It was dominant during the colonial period, but lost its standing by dint of its culture\u2019s inability to expand beyond coastal areas.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Greater Appalachia<\/strong> was founded by \u201cwave upon wave of rough, bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands\u201d who in their native lands formed a strong independent spirit, suspicious of aristocratic overlords and social reformers alike (think Mel Gibson in <em>Braveheart<\/em>).<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Deep South<\/strong>, founded by Barbados slave lords, became the bastion of white supremacy and aristocratic privilege. It is the least democratic of the 11 regions while being \u201cthe wellspring of African American culture.\u201d<\/li>\n<li><strong>New France<\/strong> is an amalgam of the Canadian Province of Qu\u00e9bec and some other areas of far eastern Canada as well as the Acadian (\u201cCajun\u201d) territories of southern Louisiana.<\/li>\n<li><strong>El Norte<\/strong> dates to the late 16th century, when the Spanish empire founded missions north into California. It includes Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Texas, as well as northern Mexican states that, Woodard says, are more oriented toward the United States than Mexico City.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Left Coast<\/strong> is a narrow strip from Monterey, California, to Juneau, Alaska, and includes San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. The cities were originally developed by Yankee traders who came by ship and the countryside by overland arrivals from the Appalachian region and the culture today is an amalgam of Yankee idealism and Appalachian independence.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Far West<\/strong> is the only area \u201cwhere environmental factors truly trumped ethnic ones.\u201d The region is unsuited for traditional farming, but its resources have been exploited by companies headquartered in distant cities and they and the federal government own vast tracts of land. Locals largely oppose federal interference (just in the news again lately), even as they depend on federal dollars.<\/li>\n<li><strong>First Nation<\/strong> he defines as a large region in the far north, where the indigenous population has never given up its lands and still employs traditional cultural practices.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Like any analysis intended to look at history through a single lens, Woodard may tailor his arguments to support his approach. Nevertheless, he presents an intriguing hypothesis that carries the ring of truth. In this political season, many of the old antagonisms and patterns he describes are newly visible and, frankly, any cogent explanation of why Americans do some of the things we do is welcome!<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;OneJS=1&amp;Operation=GetAdHtml&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;source=ss&amp;ref=as_ss_li_til&amp;ad_type=product_link&amp;tracking_id=victoweisf-20&amp;marketplace=amazon&amp;region=US&amp;placement=0143122029&amp;asins=0143122029&amp;linkId=69955641a50af10c1db66d6167dc215a&amp;show_border=true&amp;link_opens_in_new_window=true\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Colin Woodard \u2013 This 2011 book\u2014a pick of my book club\u2014is a thought-provoking analysis of the different cultural strains, mostly organized along geographic lines, that make up what author Sarah Vowell calls \u201cthe (somewhat) United States.\u201d Woodard\u2019s subtitle is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5550\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****American Nations - revisiting Colin Woodard's social history in this political season","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[266,267,268,126],"tags":[284,416,491],"class_list":["post-5550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-non-fiction","category-politics","category-reading-2","tag-map-making","tag-real-life","tag-united-states"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1rw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5550"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5556,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5550\/revisions\/5556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}