Colin Woodard's American Nations Theory

Yankeedom: Founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay as a Calvinist New Zion, Yankeedom from the outset placed a great emphasis on education, local political control, and communal utilitarianism even at the price of individual self-denial. Yankees have the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people's lives, tending to see it as an extension of the citizenry and a bulwark against aristocrats, corporations, or outside powers. Yankee history has been characterized by by a conscious project to build a more perfect society through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process, and the aggressive assimilation of foreigners. Settled by stable, educated families, Yankeedom has always had a middle-class ethos and considerable respect for intellectual achievement. The religious zeal has waned, but the heritage of "secular Puritanism" lives on. Yankeedom has been locked in nearly perpetual conflict with the Deep South for control of the federal government since the moment such a thing existed.

New Netherland: Modeled on its namesake, the short-lived colony of New Amsterdam was from the start a global commercial trading society: a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, speculative, materialistic, mercantile, free trading, raucous, and not-entirely democratic city-state where no one ethnic or religious group has ever been in charge. New Netherland nurtured two Dutch innovations considered "subversive" by most European states: a profound tolerance of diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry. Forced on other nations at the Constitutional Convention, these ideas have been passed down in the Bill of Rights. While losing the upper Hudson and Delaware Valleys to Yankeedom and the Midlands, respectively, New Netherlands is today comprised of the five boroughs of New York City, the lower Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and southwestern Connecticut. A center of global commerce, New Netherland has long been the front door for immigrants, who've made it the most densely populated part of North America. Its population is greater than that of many European nations and its influence over North American media, publishing, fashion and intellectual and economic life is hard to overstate.

The Midlands: Arguably the most "American" of nations, the Midlands was founded by English Quakers who welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies on the shoes of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle-class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate to apathetic. The only part of British North America to have a non-British majority in 1775, the Midlands has long been an ethnic mosaic dominated since the 1600s by Germans. Like Yankees, Midlanders believe society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, but they are extremely skeptical of top-down governmental intervention, as many of their tyranny-fleeing ancestors had been. Apart from being the home of the "standard American" dialect, the Midlands prove a bellwether for national political attitudes, and the key "swing vote" in every national debate from the abolition of slavery to the 2008 election. It shares the key "border cities" of Chicago (with the Yankees) and St. Louis (with Greater Appalachia). It also has an important extension in southern Ontario where many Midlanders settled after the Revolution. While less cognizant of its national identity, the Midlands nonetheless plays an enormously influential moderating role in continental politics, as it agrees with only parts of its neighbors agendas.

Tidewater: The most powerful nation during the Colonial and Early Republican periods, Tidewater has always been a fundamentally conservative nation, with a high value placed on respect for authority and tradition and very little on equality or public participation in politics. This is unsurprising being a nation founded by the younger sons of English gentry who sought to reproduce the semifeudal manorialism of the English countryside, where economic, political, and social affairs were run by the aristocracy. Originally successful, these self-styled "Cavaliers" raised a country gentleman's paradise in the Chesapeake lowlands, with indentured servants, and later slaves taking the part of the peasants. Profoundly influential in the founding of the United States, the Tidewater elites were responsible for many of the aristocratic inflections in the Constitution, including the Electoral College and Senate, both of whose memberships were to be appointed by state legislators, not chosen by the electorate. Cut off from expanding to the west by Greater Appalachia, the Tidewater's power has waned since the 1830s and it has lost ground to both its Midland rivals to the north and its Deep Southern allies in the Atlantic Piedmont.

Greater Appalachia: Founded in the early eighteenth century by by wave upon wave of rough, bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged Borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands. Lampooned by popular media as "rednecks," "hillbillies," "crackers," and "white trash," these clannish Scots-Irish, Scots, and north English frontiersmen spread across the highland South and into the North American river valleys, clashing all the way with Indians, Mexicans, and Yankees. Formed in a state of near-constant upheaval in the British Isles, a warrior-ethic was fostered alongside a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty. Intensely suspicious of aristocrats and social reformers alike, these American Borderlanders despised Yankee teachers, Tidewater lords, and Deep Southern aristocrats. Despite much of the region fighting for the Union during the civil war, their resistance to the liberation of black slaves during Reconstruction drove Greater Appalachia into its lasting alliance with Tidewater and the Deep South. Greater Appalachia has historically provided a large proportion of the U.S. military, from officers like Andrew Jackson, Davey Crockett, and Douglas MacArthur, to the present soldiers in Afghanistan. They also gave the continent bluegrass and country music, stock car racing, and Evangelical fundamentalism. Greater Appalachia's people have often had a poor awareness of their cultural origins, with many Scots-Irish responding to heritage questions with "American" and even "Native American."

The Deep South: Founded by Barbados slave lords as a West Indies-style slave society, for much of American history the Deep South has been the bastion of white supremacy, aristocratic privilege, and a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was a privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. It remains the least democratic of the nations, a one-party entity where race remains the primary determinant of one's political affiliations. From its beachhead at Charleston the Deep South expanded through the Southern lowlands before having its territorial ambitions in Latin America halted. In frustration, the Deep South dragged the federation down into a bloody civil war in an effort to carve out its own nation-state alongside its reluctant Tidewater and smattering of Appalachian allies. Successfully resisting the Yankee-led occupation, the Deep South became the center for the state's rights movement, racial segregation, and labor and environmental deregulation. Having forged an uneasy "Dixie" coalition with Tidewater and Greater Appalachia in the 1870s, the Deep South is locked in an epic battle with Yankeedom and its Left Coast and New Netherlands allies for control of the federation.

New France: The most overtly nationalistic of the nations, possessing a nation-state-in-waiting in the form of the Province of Quebec. Founded in the early 1600s, New French culture blends the folkways of ancien regime northern French peasantry with the traditions and values of the aboriginal people they encountered in northeastern America. Down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus driven, the New French have been recently revealed by pollsters to be (by far) the most liberal nation in North America. Long oppressed by their British overlords, the New French have, since the mid-20th century, imparted many of their attitudes to the Canadian federation, where multiculturalism and negotiated consensus are treasured. They are indirectly responsible for the reemergence of First Nation.

El Norte: The oldest of the Euro-American nations, El Norte dates back to the sixteenth-century establishment of the Spanish imperial outposts of Monterrey and Saltillo on the northern fringes of Mexico. This resurgent nation spreads from the US-Mexico border for a hundred miles or more in either direction, where its overwhelmingly Hispanic society has long been a hybrid of Anglo- and Spanish America, with an economy tilted more towards the United States than Mexico City. While Americans see the southwestern borderlands as a place apart, dominated by a culture with an alien language and norms, many Mexicans find their nortenyo kinsmen to be overwhelmingly Americanized. Nortenyos have a well-earned reputation for being more independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and work-centered than many Mexicans from the more densely populated hierarchical society of of the Mexican core. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary fervor, the northern Mexican states have more in common--historically, culturally, economically, gastronomically--with the United States' Hispanic southwestern borderlands than they do with the rest of Mexico, despite being split by an increasingly-militarized border not entirely unlike East and West Germany.

The Left Coast: A Chile-shaped nation pinned between the Pacific and the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges, the Left Coast extends in a strip from Monterey, California, to Juneau, Alaska, including four decidedly progressive metropolises: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. A wet region of staggering natural beauty, it was originally colonized by two groups: missionaries, merchants and woodsmen from New England (who arrived by sea and controlled the towns) and farmers, prospectors, and fur traders from Greater Appalachia (who arrived by wagon and dominated the countryside). Originally founded to be a "New England on the Pacific," the Left Coast combines the Yankee faith in good government and social reform to a commitment to individual self-exploration and discovery. The Left Coast has been the birthplace of the modern environmental movement and the global information revolution (home to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, and Silicon Valley), and the cofounder (along with New Netherland) of the gay rights movement, the peace movement, and the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The closest ally of Yankeedom, it battles constantly against the libertarian-corporate agenda of its neighbor, the Far West.

The Far West: Climate and geography have shaped all of the nations to some extent, but the Far West is the only one where environmental factors truly trumped ethnic ones. High, dry, and remote, the interior west presented conditions so severe that they effectively destroyed those who tried to apply the farming and lifestyle techniques used in Greater Appalachia, the Midlands, or other nations. With minor exceptions this vast region couldn't be effectively colonized without the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems. As a result, the colonization of much of the region was facilitated and directed by large corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government itself, which controlled much of the land. Even if they didn't work for the companies, settlers were dependent upon railroads for transportation of goods, people, and products to and from far-off markets and manufacturing centers. Unfortunately for the settlers, the region was treated like an internal colony, exploited and despoiled for the benefit of the seaboard nations. Despite significant industrialization during World War II and the Cold War, the region remains in a state of semi-dependency. Its political class tends to revile the federal government--often aligning it with the Dixie coalition--while demanding it continue to receive federal largesse. It rarely challenges its corporate masters, who maintain a near-Gilded Age levels of influence over Far Western affairs.

First Nation: Like the Far West, First Nation encompasses a vast region with a hostile climate: the boreal forests, tundra, and glaciers of the far north. The difference, however, is that its indigenous inhabitants still occupy the area in force--most of them having never given up their land by treaty--and still retain cultural practices and knowledge that allow them to survive in the region on its own terms. Native Americans have recently begun reclaiming their sovereignty and have won both considerable autonomy in Alaska and Nunavut and a self-governing nation-state in Greenland, which stands on the threshold of full independence from Denmark. As inhabitants of a new--and very old--nation, First Nation's people have a chance to put native North America back on the map culturally, politically, and environmentally.


There is actually a great deal of evidence to prove that this theory is true. Below is the genetic evidence which shows clusters of people in the United States by common ancestry.


There's also a load of evidence of the differing cultures in various categories as shown on this guy Jayman's blog. jaymans.wordpress.com/american-nations-series/

So what do you think of this theory? If you live in the USA what nation do you live in and does this theory describe your region accurately?