The American Nations regions across North America
colinwoodard.com
colinwoodard.com
If you read news and opinion articles from the early 1900’s you’ll find that many authors are saying the same thing as people say today. In context of American Nations, the answer is “we’ve always been like that.”
I'm not sure why anyone should expect the South to escape criticism for defining itself on racialized chattel slavery; fighting a war largely to preserve that system; having Jim Crow, lynching, etc.; continuing into the modern day to wish to rename things in favor of treasonous Confederates; being literal economic deadweight that benefits from an influx of tax dollars from Blue states (Yankee states, and "Left Coast", in this nations model) via the Federal government, even while voting against "s0cIALism" and constantly denigrating Yankee and Left Coast cities and states.
North had "racialized chattel slavery" as well.
> having Jim Crow, lynching, etc.;
The rest of the country had lynchings, race riots, discrimination as well.
> continuing into the modern day to wish to rename things in favor of treasonous Confederates;
"Treasonous". They certainly weren't treated like traitors after the civil war ended.
> being literal economic deadweight that benefits from an influx of tax dollars from Blue states (Yankee states, and "Left Coast" )
Can't complain when they weren't allowed to leave...
> even while voting against "s0cIALism" and constantly denigrating Yankee and Left Coast cities and states.
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer...
https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=Albion%27...
https://search.worldcat.org/title/Albion's-seed-:-four-Briti...
If there was some good standard survey on cultural views, you could compare geo regions on the summary stats of their responses, and cluster them. But you'd need a _huge_ number of responses to get good county-level data. And then I think we'd expect to see lots of county-to-county differences reflecting the urban-rural contours, immigration differences tied to industry, etc, rather than these big, uninterrupted regions. E.g. I would think King County, WA and Alameda County, CA have a lot more in common with each other than either does with Del Norte County, CA.
> my Motivf colleagues and I refined the ad hoc models and produced what you might call the “official” American Nations Model spreadsheets for the United States, mapping the regional cultures at county-level resolution.
> This summer, we’ve expanded the analytical model to the rest of North America covered in American Nations.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cul...
that shape screams "there are a couple of clear clusters nearby, and this is the leftover 'in-between' space we didn't know how to handle so we made a new cluster"
It is closer to a Buzzfeed quiz explaining how your astrological sign dictates your Hogwarts House than anything remotely resembling academic rigor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia
Wow, hadn't thought about that book in years (the action takes place in 1999!).
Low key writing this has made me realize how much of my life has just been migrating up and down I-40.
I can't speak on Knoxville because I've only spent a day there, but I've spent a good bit of time around Amarillo mostly from driving between CO and TX over a hundred times, although not really in the suburbs.
Saw a lot of beat up trucks that looked like they were owned by blue collar folks and used for truck things. But of course there's also plenty of brodozers, which I'm assuming are also fairly common in Knoxville.
I was just saying two middle class families living a thousand miles away from each other along I-40 were fairly similar to me. They are also considered in the same nation according to this map.
The only part of this map I'd quibble with based on personal experience is Birmingham, AL (and Jefferson County) is definitely in that same Greater Appalachia nation because I can't in my heart of hearts say it and Dothan, AL have anything in common. The most interesting thing in Dothan is a hardware store.
Culturally, they both share a concern over Gun control for one. Those specific groups happen to align politically on the issue, which is incidental.
They're obviously not related by immigration group either. The Hopi descend from early first nations. The Navajo descend from the athabascan migrations. Yukon comes from Canadian and British gold rush populations. Alberta comes from various prairie settler efforts, including Ukrainian Canadians. The Mormons were their own settlement group in Mexico that went to war with many of the (now-) surrounding indigenous nations. Etc.
And this is just one "American nation". The same basic issue exists in all of them.
The fact there are political differences by region is not a defining factor, or the regions would look very different. The fact it is a cultural topic at all, looks to be one common factor. I feel like I'm talking in circles now.
Regardless, I really don't understand this sort of hair splitting. My imagination isn't that expansive, yet I can understand how these regions might have been determined in many cases. Asking the authors might get answers to these kinds of questions.
Early in the revolution, it was taken by the colonists who declared it “Illinois County, Virginia” and allowed people to stream in and claim their homesteads (Note that the northern part was claimed by Connecticut as their own “Western Reserve”). Essentially all of southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois was settled by people crossing the river from Kentucky, so it makes a lot of sense that you’d think that the southern parts of all these states seem more similar to each other than they are to their northern neighbors.
The next section north seems to have been mostly dominated by folks from the mid-Atlantic - Virginia, etc. And further north dominated by people that arrived on sailing ships, especially from New York. New Buffalo Michigan refers to Buffalo New York ;)
Anyway, it seems kind of weird that these states seem geographically oriented north-south but culturally oriented east-west. But the fact that they were depopulated (of Europeans) and then repopulated (by Europeans) gives an explanation of that, especially with the transportation available at the time of repopulation (of Europeans).
But southern Indiana is very different. Definitely more similar to Kentucky & Cincinatti-area southern Ohio. You start to get "twangs" of Southern Americana as you approach the Ohio River Valley, which are basically non-existent in northern Indiana. Something about the air is different.
The biggest cultural shock people not from the midwest, and even people from the midwest, often experience about the area is IME northern mainland/non-UP Michigan. Its a truly unique region that is dissimilar to almost anywhere else I've visited; like mixing the cultures of the New England coast with rural farms.
Illinois is an interesting place as it features large changes in culture from north to south. I was born in Northern Illinois and lived there until I was 10 when I moved 5 hours south. There is an enormous cultural difference. As the map shows Northern Illinois is part of the "Midlands" with a flat/generic accent whereas the Southern Illinois/Southern Indiana accent sounds a lot like Woody Harrelson's (who was born in Texas). The greater Chicagoland area is its own thing, the map shows it part of Yankeedom but I disagree - I lived in Chicago twice in my 20s and I've lived in Yankeedom (Massachusetts) for 25 years now and I don't see much similarity. I'd group far northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota in their own group, maybe called the "Opers"
But IMO that's a very far cry from eastern/south-eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western NC, WV, etc; truly core Appalachia.
Its also a far cry from mid-Indiana, which is culturally identical to northern Indiana, most of Illinois, Iowa, southern Michigan, maybe even as far as southern Wisconsin, Kansas, and Nebraska. That's Corn/Rust belt, very crop-farm oriented, dairy farms, extremely flat, but not as rural as many people think, not nearly as rural as Appalachia or the west.
https://www.newsweek.com/psychology-psychopaths-dark-triad-m...
and my first though is "What's different about South Dakota and North Dakota" and got told by a friend who's a geography nerd that much of South Dakota is really weird and isolated and different from other states.
My favorite mapbuilder of this sort is using https://pitchinteractiveinc.github.io/tilegrams/
Seems accurate but interesting this is the only area with crossover.
I live pretty much on the border between two regions on the map, and you can definitely see a difference just driving one county north or south. But of course you also see exceptions on both sides, in both individual homes or small towns that seem more suited for the other side of the border.
We can ignore current settlement patterns because Woodard does. In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...) he does explain the methodology, although I don't have access - but from the snippets I can see it appears that he's essentially trying to work out who the first European settlers in each area were. So it doesn't matter that north Fulton County is full of carpetbaggers from up North and immigrants. (I write this as I sit in an office in north Fulton County; I am a carpetbagger from up North and many of my co-workers are immigrants.)
It makes sense for the split to be along county lines just because a lot of data will be available at the county level, but it occasionally produces absurd results. I occasionally have mocked these splits as "I drive to Appalachia for ramen", because I used to live in DeKalb County about a mile from the DeKalb-Gwinnett county line - according to Woodard's map, DeKalb is "Deep South" and Gwinnett is "Appalachia" - and I liked a ramen place just over the county line. (Since then both I and the ramen place have moved.)
This is similar to something I saw on reddit over the weekend which was a similar map but based on local cuisine. I live in North Fulton County now, but I'm originally from central Alabama and the dividing line for the cuisine was between "soul food" and whatever other term they had come up for deep fried food
Basically it was white people southern food vs. black people southern food (which, at the end of the day is actually not that different)
curious if this Appalachia vs. "Deep South" thing is really just a racial divide in the data with "Deep South" being African American descendants of slaves across the Black Belt and Appalachia being the more white population
The map in this post is historically based, I think, but they don't say that very loudly.
And definitely some of what we're seeing in this data is a racial divide - but the racial divide in the South goes back to where slave-based agriculture was and was not viable.
This seems like a much saner breakdown of the US into mega-regions. Feels much more intuitive and doesn't involve wacky stuff like grouping Philadelphia; the Oklahoma panhandle; and Mooseknuckle, Ontario together.
For instance where I live in Deschutes County, Oregon... physically, yeah, we are in that 'far west' region, but have a lot of cultural and economic ties to Oregon and even California west of the mountains.
And the "Far West" is an absolute cop-out, and calling Central Texas culturally "central Appalachia" is completely ridiculous.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250922163253/https://colinwood...
(all in good jest)
Very much not the same as US "midlands" in my opinion.
Another comment mentions this is based at least partially off original settlement/immigration patterns so I'm willing to be more leniant now, but at the very least inside the Beltway should be Federal entity/Capital area.
It is very much: Left Coast, First Nation, Texas, in that order.
At least for other places in the US I've been, this map seems to hold up! Curious what others think of it.
If you posterize enough to get to a map this course, then you'd have "The Left Coast" running down the Sierras, with parts of Klamath and Cascade Ranges (notably excepting the Shasta corner, which is more closely related to the Klan country side of Oregon). This can be somewhat justified, if one argues that the difference between the cultural ideas of the Bay Area are just urban versions of those that occupy the mountains (oddly harmonious mix of hippies and libertarians vs. the Bay's coexistence of corporate libertarians and progressives).
> All the way in the south
Marrying a woman from Louisiana has been similarly instructive to me as regards "the South".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer...
«First Nations (French: Premières Nations) is a term used to identify Indigenous peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis.»
If you can make space for New Netherland, it doesn't make any sense to collapse all northern native cultures together, when they are just as or even more diverse than the US east cost.
I also don't think the US ended up absorbing much British cuisine, certainly native food(s) and immigrant waves have contributed much more than England.