70 pages • 2-hour read
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
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Key Figures
Colin Woodard
Woodard (born 1968), the author of the book, is a journalist and historian with a bachelor’s degree from Tuft’s University and a master’s in international relations from the University of Chicago. He has written for the Christian Science Monitor, the Economist, The New York Times, and other publications and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Study and a Polk Award in journalism (“About.” Colin Woodard).
Woodard lives in Portland, Maine, in the heart of what he calls Yankeedom, and his commitment to that culture implicitly informs his characterization of other regions. In particular, it is apparent that Woodard believes the culture of the Dixie bloc is flawed. For example, he describes the culture of the Deep South as committed to a “caste system” and “apartheid”—an allusion to the legal system of racial segregation that formerly existed in South Africa. His depiction of The Regions at Loggerheads may also reflect his background in foreign correspondence—in particular, his experience covering the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, in which fragmentation along ethnic and cultural lines sometimes erupted in violent conflict.
American Nations is one of several books Woodard has published on US history and political culture. His 2016 American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good traces an ideological conflict that to some extent maps onto the regional one that American Nations depicts, with Yankeedom, for example, fiercely committed to a communitarian ethos and the Deep South as insistent on individual freedom—at least, for members of its elite class. In 2020, Woodard published Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, which documents a different ideological conflict, but one no less intertwined with regional differences, in Woodard’s depiction: the tension between ideals of freedom and equality on the one hand and white supremacy on the other.
David Hackett Fischer
David Hackett Fischer (born 1935) is a historian with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. A long-time faculty member at Brandeis University, Fischer has received numerous awards, including the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History for his work Washington’s Crossing (“2005 Pulitzer Prizes.” The Pulitzer Prizes). Woodard, however, is primarily interested in Fischer’s 1989 work Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which argues that the modern-day character of the US reflects the legacy of four different kinds of English immigrants: Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Borderlanders. These groups overlap substantially with the cultures Woodard associates with Yankeedom, the Tidewater, the Midlands, and Greater Appalachia, respectively. However, Woodard extends Fischer’s argument beyond English immigrants to consider other early residents of the colonial US, including the Dutch and French.
Wilbur Zelinsky
Wilbur Zelinsky (1921-2013) was a cultural geographer with degrees from the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and the University of Berkeley, California. He taught at various institutions, including Pennsylvania State University. In the context of American Nations, he is most notable for his “Theory of First Effective Settlement,” which contends that the cultural character of a region is shaped by its first settlers—an idea Woodard draws on heavily.
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