AMERICAN NATIONS
a history of the eleven regional cultures of North America
by Colin Woodward
A history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions challenges popular perceptions about the red state-blue state conflict, tracing lingering tensions stemming from disparate intranational values that have shaped every major event in history. (NoveList)
Kirkus: /*
Starred Review */ Forget about the United States and Canada. The true nations
of North America, writes historian and Christian Science Monitor foreign
correspondent Woodard (The Republic of Pirates, 2007, etc.), have little to do
with those artificialities. Borrowing fruitful notions from Joel Garreau's Nine
Nations of North America (1981) and David Hackett Fischer's Albion's
Seed: Four British Folkways in North America (1989), Woodard traces the
differences in America's regions to cultural, ethnic, religious and political
differences among various strains of settlers, many of them long in play back
in the British Isles. What he calls The Midlands, for instance, extends from
the central Atlantic Seaboard deep into the Great Plains, encircling "Yankeedom"
by taking in the southern tier of east-central Canada. These regions are the
historical purview of, respectively, the Quakers of the English Midlands and
the Puritans of England's eastern coast, with their distinct views of human
nature and how government had to be organized to respond to it. Some of his
"eleven stateless nations of North America" descend from these two
regions, representing the old divide between moderate conservatism, with its
"middle-class ethos and considerable respect for intellectual
achievement," and moderate liberalism, with its view that "society
should be organized to benefit ordinary people." Other regions, though,
are the product of an English elite that mistrusted any government that
presumed to tell them what to do, even though they descended from feudalism.
Behold, then, the South, both the aristocratic piedmont of Virginia and North
Carolina and the hardscrabble, God-haunted, fearful Deep South. The author
connects these regional differences to deep divisions in American life, noting
that the old struggle between those moderate forces has been supplanted by the
rise of that Deep South, perfected in the 2000 election, when it
"established simultaneous control over the White House, Senate, and House
of Representatives for the first time in forty-six years."Woodard offers a
fascinating way to parse American (writ large) politics and history in this
excellent book. (Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2011)
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