Colin Woodward: American Nations

"A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America"

Woodward continues what Albion's Seed and The Nine Nations of North America I haven't read the latter began, with a history of the nations. "Nations" means an ethnically/linguistically/religiously coherent group--which doesn't always coincide with a legal state.

He figures there are eleven nations: Yankeedom, the Deep South, New Netherland, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, Midlands, New France, El Norte (the oldest), the Far West, the Left Coast, and the First Nation. The latter isn't all the Amerindians, only those of the far north.

This view of the history was very interesting. He brought in details of history I'd forgotten, and some I hadn't heard of, and wove them into a plausible pattern--so smooth that I started to get suspicious about cherry-picking.

So far I was eager to recommend it.

Then he got into the Culture Wars section, and eras I actually knew quite a bit about, having lived through them. Oy. He's a partisan himself. He doesn't understand religion--he seems to think it to be politics by other means. And his descriptions of nations he doesn't agree with, and things like the Tea Party--can you say "invidious?" But his take on the nations' modern history slots smoothly into his framework, which calls into question how accurately the older history really fits: how much of that did he caricature too?

I'll have to cross-check some of his claims. E.g. Appalachia didn't completely ally with Dixie until after the war. Given the name Yankees had earned in the early years of the country, I suspect he's right that Appalachia was torn between hating the Yankees and the Deep South masters.

He finds it easy to spot the ulterior motives of the movers-and-shakers in the Far West and the Deep South, but Yankeedom and the secular descendents of the Puritans are almost always on the side of the angels. Except perhaps for the time the federal budget surplus (37% !)was turned into Civil War veteran/widow/children pensions--only for Union soldiers, of course, so all the money flowed north.

If the Wikipedia article on "Nine Nations" is correct, all three books have a vast gap, one that Fischer promised to fill but never did. The black cultures in North America don't map neatly onto the "white" cultures. I'm not sure I'd rely on Woodward to fill that gap, though.