Colin Woodard Read Online Free Page B

for Democrats? Those belonging to El Norte. National affinities consistently trump state ones, and they’ve done so for centuries. 6
    I’m not the first person to have recognized the importance of these regional cultures to North American history, politics, and governance. Kevin Phillips, a Republican Party campaign strategist, identified the distinct boundaries and values of several of these nations in 1969, and used them to accurately prophesy the Reagan Revolution in his Emerging Republican Majority , a politico cult classic. In 1981 Washington Post editor Joel Garreau wrote The Nine Nations of North America , a best seller that observed that the continent was divided into rival power blocs that corresponded to few national, state, or provincial boundaries. His regional paradigm argued the future would be shaped by the competing, conflicting aspirations of these North American nations. But because his book was ahistorical—a snapshot in time, not an exploration of the past—Garreau couldn’t accurately identify the nations, how they formed, or what their respective aspirations were.
    Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer detailed the origins and early evolution of four of these nations—the ones I call Yankeedom, the Midlands, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—in his 1989 classic Albion’s Seed , and added New France in Champlain’s Dream , published twenty years later. Russell Shorto described the salient characteristics of New Netherland in The Island at the Center of the World in 2004. Virginia senator Jim Webb’s Born Fighting (2005) is, in effect, a plea to his fellow Borderlanders for a national self-awakening, while Michael Lind of the New America Foundation has called on his fellow Texans to unseat autocratic Deep Southern rule in favor of the progressive Appalachian strain of the Hill Country. Awareness of these American nations has been slowly gestating for the past several decades. This book aims to see them finally delivered into the popular consciousness.
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    Any argument that claims to identify a series of discrete nations on the North American continent must address the obvious objection: can nations founded centuries ago really have maintained their distinct identities to the present day? We’re a continent of immigrants and internal migrants, after all, and those tens of millions of newcomers representing every possible culture, race, and creed surely must have diluted and dissipated those old cultures. Is it not the height of fancy to suggest New York City’s distinctive culture is a heritage of having been founded by the Dutch, given that people of Dutch ancestry now account for just 0.2 percent of its population? In Massachusetts and Connecticut—those most Yankee of states—the largest ethnic groups are the Irish and Italians respectively. One might naturally assume that the continent’s nations must have long since melted into one another, creating a rich, pluralistic stew. But, as we will see, the expected course of events isn’t what actually happened. North American life has been immeasurably enriched by the myriad cultures and peoples who settled there. I personally celebrate our continent’s diversity, but I also know that my great-grandfather’s people in western Iowa—Lutheran farmers from the island of Funen in Denmark—assimilated into the dominant culture of the Midland Midwest, even as they contributed to its evolution. My Irish Catholic greatgrandparents worked the iron and copper mines of the interior West, but their children grew up to be Far Westerners. My great-great-great-grandmother’s family fled from the same part of Ireland as their future cousins-in-law, but the mines they found work in happened to be in Québec, so their descendants grew up speaking French and traveling on aboriginal snowshoes. All of them undoubtedly altered the places to which they emigrated—for the