In a class my friend took in college, he had to think of five labels to describe himself. When my friend gave his labels, his professor asked why he didn’t include “American” as one of them. Intrigued by this exercise, I too, found that “American” was not really a way in which I thought of myself (though my views have evolved on this topic since I started working with many colleagues not from the U.S.). I thought about it off and on for a few years, trying to understand why it didn’t feel right.

Albion’s Seed, historian David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 treatise on four Anglo migrations to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which he asserts determined much of American culture over the next several centuries, gave me an answer. Fischer identifies four “folkways”, patterns of culture associated with specific populations that settled in the present day U.S.: those of the Puritans settling in Massachusetts, Cavaliers in the Tidewater region, Quakers settling in the Delaware Valley, and Borderlanders settling in the Appalachian backcountry. Many of the attributes being “American” connotes to me: love of guns, hate of government, strong suspicion of elites and academics, originated from the Borderlanders, who emigrated via Ireland from the violent border between England and Scotland to the New World.

On the other hand, Puritan folkways: high regard for education, “improving the time” through hard work, even institutions of local administration: town meetings and selectmen, resonated much more strongly with me (my hometown is mentioned in a footnote).

America has never been a homogenous culture, Albion’s Seed shows, rather, an uneasy compromise between several. Despite Albion’s Seed’s extremely thorough treatment of early Anglo-American cultures, Fischer treads lightly on the several centuries since, though his final hundred pages do include a case study of the presidency through the lens of his four folkways.

Anxious for more, I turned to a newer book. Colin Woodard’s American Nations, published in 2011, incorporates seven new ethnoregional nations—Woodard’s equivalent of Fischer’s folkways—with the original four rebranded respectively as “Yankee”, “Tidewater”, “Midlands”, and “Greater Appalachia”. American Nations focuses more on the evolution of the cultures and updates Albion’s Seed for the twenty-first century.

Or it attempts to. While both Albion’s Seed and American Nations discuss ethnoregional cultures in North America, the similarities end there. American Nations is not at all like Albion’s Seed: not in style, not in substance, and not in attitude. Fischer’s work is intellectually stimulating and fun to read, due to his thorough research and incisive prose. Woodard’s work could not be farther from this; it is intellectually dishonest and upsetting to read: polemic demagoguery in a cultural history’s clothing.

A map of the America's ethnoregional nations according to Colin Woodard

The American nations according to Colin Woodard.

Malcolm Gladwell Writes History

These are harsh words, and perhaps ones that are not entirely fair. Fischer is a professor of history at Brandeis University, while Woodard is a reporter, but considers himself “a historian” (Woodard backflap). Regardless of Woodard’s self-identified profession, one doesn’t need to read far into American Nations before realizing that there’s a difference between the way a professor of history and a self-identified historian do history. Consider the motivation of Albion’s Seed:

The problem is to explain the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws, individualist in its society and pluralist in its culture. (Fischer 4)

And its thesis:

That is the central thesis of this book: the legacy of four British folkways in early America remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today. (Fischer 4)

On the other hand, Colin Woodard’s thesis betrays his popular ambitions:

This book aims to see them [America’s ethnoregional nations] finally delivered into popular consciousness. (Woodard 15)

This difference in purpose reflects itself in prose as well; Woodard tries to be more casual. He uses less intrusive endnotes instead of footnotes, Zagat-style quotation soups instead of block quotes, and casual constructions like “So how does all of this relate to El Norte?” (Woodard 27) or the jarring introduction to chapter 13: “If you’re an American, have you ever really asked yourself why Canada exists?” (Woodard 150)

Fischer assumes a slightly more educated reader with more knowledge of U.S. history. In his “Cavaliers” section, Fischer makes references to Bacon’s Rebellion without ever giving much background on the event. Woodard, on the other hand, precedes a discussion of the cultural significance of the Texas Revolution with a brief recap.

It is a little surprising that Woodard is the one who is including more information about political events, considering that his book is nearly three times shorter than Fischer’s and covers nearly three times as many ethnoregional cultures (four vs. eleven). Spreading a book this thin has costs: concreteness and nuance.

A Man with a Watch Knows What Time It Is, A Man with Two Watches is Never Sure

At the beginning of Albion’s Seed, Fischer discusses how he’ll make his argument:

If these folkways are to be described truly, they must be described empirically—that is, by reference to evidence which can be verified or falsified. In this work, descriptive examples are presented in the text for illustrative purposes, and empirical indicators are summarized in the notes. (Fischer 11)

It’s not fair to expect Woodard to include empirical measurements of culture as Fischer does; Fischer writes mostly a work on a snapshot of American culture with some politics thrown in at the end, while Woodard’s main motivation is the evolution of these cultures as a tool to explain political events. That said, including “descriptive examples” is helpful both pedagogically and in terms of adding color to what might otherwise be a dry text. Consider how much this one anecdote from Albion’s Seed says about religion and culture in the Appalachian backcountry:

One family of Scottish Presbyterians told him [Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason] plainly that “they wanted no damn black gown sons of bitches among them,” and threatened to use him as a backlog in their fireplace. (Fischer 703)

Illustrative examples do not seem to occur with quite the same frequency in American Nations, perhaps victims of page count. Lack of color be damned, though, the general argument of the book should hold up regardless of the examples it presents. I’m not convinced this is the case either. Some passages when considered together are confusing, because they seem to indicate incompatible conclusions. Woodard discusses the founding of the Left Coast:

The [left] coast blended the moral, intellectual, and utopian impulses of a Yankee elite with the self-sufficient individualism of its Appalachian and immigrant majority. the culture that formed—idealistic but individualistic—was unlike that of the gold-digging lands in the interior but very similar to those in western Oregon and Washington. (Woodard 223)

This seems reasonable and in line with the popular conception of the Left Coast. At the beginning, though, Woodard discusses the importance of founding groups on culture:

Wilbur Zelinsky of Pennsylvania State University formulated the key theory in 1973, which he called the Doctrine of First Effective Settlement. “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been,” Zelinsky wrote. “Thus, in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later.” (Woodard 16)

There’s a bit of a mismatch here: the Left Coast combined cultures vs. cultures are determined entirely by founding groups. These statements could be made compatible: We can say that the Yankees and Greater Appalachian/immigrant peoples formed one group whose culture determined that of the Left Coast’s. That’s not really the argument that Woodard is making though, he’s saying that two separate groups kept their individual cultures but it resulted in some sort of hybrid culture. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but oversteps the preconditions of Zelinsky’s conjecture and therefore requires additional justification, which Woodard does not provide.

A particularly egregious contradiction concerns Yankee behavior in the early nineteenth century. First, during the presidency of John Adams:

All citizens had the right to elect their own representatives, the [Yankee] thinking went, but once they did, they owed them their absolute deference—not just to the laws they passed but to everything they said or did while in office. If they disapproved, they were to keep quiet until the next election, when they could vote in another candidate. “The government ought, especially in great measures, to be [sure] of the harmonious and cheerful cooperation of its citizens,” Yale president Timothy Dwight explained in a 1798 sermon. (Woodard 163)

Six pages and sixteen years later, we learn that the Yankees have apparently decided that rule doesn’t apply when Virginians are in power:

Yankee frustration culminated with a convention of New England leaders held in Hartford in December 1814. In the run-up to the meeting, John Lowell, scion of one of the region’s most powerful families, called for delegates to draft a new federal constitution and offer membership only to the original thirteen states. The Revolutionary Era alliance would be restored on Yankee terms, and the uncouth Borderlander-settled territories beyond the mountains would be allowed to join Great Britain. … Standing on the brink, the conventioneers themselves pulled back. After a series of secret meetings, they emerged with a list of proposed constitutional amendments to initiate negotiations with the federal government. (Woodard 169)

I’m not claiming the Yankees’ inconsistent and seemingly hypocritical behavior is Woodard’s fault, but it seems odd that he doesn’t even acknowledge this complete reversal in Yankee political etiquette. Instead of learning something about Yankee culture, I now am not sure what lesson I can take from the combination of these two passages.

This lack of nuance and justification plagues American Nations. Woodard writes about the three major waves of immigrants to the U.S.:

It’s not difficult to understand why immigrants avoided the three southern nations. Most were fleeing countries with repressive feudal systems controlled by entrenched aristocracies; until 1866 the Deep South and Tidewater were repressive, near-feudal systems with entrenched aristocracies, and after Reconstruction ended in 1877 they returned to form. (Woodard 256)

I could make the opposite argument: Immigrants from repressive feudal societies might like the southern nations because they were more like home, but not so harsh. Admittedly, this is a weak argument, but no less speculative than Woodard’s. Here, and throughout American Nations, Woodard diverges from Fischer, who supplements his points with empirical evidence and includes quotes from primary sources as anecdata. See Appendix A for more examples of passages from American Nations lacking concreteness and nuance.

Those who do not learn from history …

Perhaps it’s not the job of the popular author to reconcile all the details of history, but more to extract the gist from it: to take works from historians like Fischer, update them, and distill them into a more digestible form. This seems mostly consistent with Woodard’s approach in American Nations. He certainly takes and cites important ideas from Albion’s Seed:

As one scholar would later put it: “The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.” (388) (Woodard 56)

And sometimes takes ideas from it without citation (emphasis mine on terms from Albion’s Seed):

The new constitution trespassed on the Borderlanders’ belief in natural liberty and overturned the radical 1776 constitution they’d forced on Pennsylvania. (Woodard 158)

Woodard also demonstrates he wants to update Albion’s Seed by acknowledging the criticism it’s attracted:

Fischer’s focus is on demonstrating the continuities between specific regional cultures in the British Isles and their North American splinters, a thesis that’s taken some knocks from other academics. (Woodard 323)

And he does succeed in addressing some of these critiques. By taking a temporally longer view of the ethnoregional nations, he can address how they reacted to various events, and not fall into Fischer’s self-set trap of “Culture is dynamic, ever changing, Fischer insists, but at the same time old ways persist.” identified by Darrett Rutman writing in The American Historical Review.

Woodard also includes more colonial cultures, specifically, the Deep South as distinct from Tidewater, the New France culture around New Orleans and in modern day Quebec, and the New Amsterdam culture in present day New York City. He also discusses some of the first settlers of the New World “going wild” and living with the Native Americans in modern day Quebec as a result of their influence. Perhaps this is a response to the critique from the late Charles Joyner, who laments in The Journal of American Folklore:

… Albion’s Seed devotes only two pages to immigration and race (pp. 810-812) and not quite three pages to other colonial cultures (pp. 816-819) … Albion’s Seed purports to explain the origins of American culture and “the determinants of a voluntary society,” without acknowledging much influence from either Native American residents or from African or continental European immigrants.

American Nations still falls short of fully addressing Dr. Joyner’s critique, though, due to a hole the size of the United States’ black population. Woodard is not really sure how to treat black Americans’ distinct culture. When Woodard discusses the counterculture movement of the 1960s, he acknowledges its cultural origins:

Combining the utopia-seeking moral impulses of secularized Puritanism, the intellectual freedom of New Netherland, and the tolerant pacifism of the Midlands, the social movement [of the 1960s] sought to remake and improve the world by breaking down the very sorts of traditional institutions and social taboos Dixie whites were fighting to protect. (Woodard 279)

Contrast this with his lack of discussion of the cultural origins of the Civil Rights movement, led by African Americans that do not fit neatly into Woodard’s eleven nations:

African Americans in the Deep South led the movement, challenging apartheid policies across the region: … The majority of the movement’s most famous figures were Deep Southerners, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (from Atlanta) … (Woodard 275)

Breakdown of the cultures themselves may compound this issue. Jonathan Steplyk identifies this issue in Albion’s Seed:

Among the few flaws in Albion’s Seed is that Fisher [sic] succumbs to the temptation of overextending how far his thesis can be stretched in its application to American history as a whole.

While American Nations does take a less rigid stance than Albion’s Seed and acknowledges major shifts in the culture, we start to see its logic overstretched as time progresses as well:

During the 1930s the [U.S.] federation was divided on the necessity of preparing for war. New Netherland congressmen were hawkish on military preparations, perhaps because so many of their constituents had emigrated from countries endangered by Hitler. Their Left Coast, Far West, and El Norte colleagues followed suit, especially as the federal government began situating war industries and military bases in the region. Midlanders generally opposed these measures, in part due to the German Americans’ reluctance to go to war with their former countrymen. Opinion in Yankeedom was deeply divided, with the New England core more inclined to prepare for war than the Great Lakes and Yankee midwest. (Woodard 290)

It’s hard to see here how the founding characteristics of the ethnoregional nations explain their spectrum of opinions toward joining World War II; rather, it seems like they were more influenced by demographics at the time. Woodard’s reasoning does not rely on deep-seated cultural tradition.

And yet even these issues are not enough to justify the harsh words I levelled at American Nations at the beginning of this review. Something else needs to give.

I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

Despite not having read Fischer’s book Historians’ Fallacies, Wikipedia’s paraphrasing of his views on the fallacy of presentism—the “anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past”—elucidate the motivation behind many passages of Albion’s Seed, where he seeks out not just the behavior of a particular group, but why that behavior exists. The Puritans didn’t just cultivate “an attitude of respect for the old”, they venerated their elders because “‘If any man is favored with long life,’ wrote Increase Mather, ‘it is God who has lengthened his days.’” (Fischer 103). Age was a sign of election consistent with “The Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement—that Jesus died only for the elect…” (Fischer 104). Fischer also seeks causes for cultural phenomena when he writes about “gender ways” among the Cavaliers:

In the Chesapeake … adulterous women were punished more harshly than adulterous men. For that offense, women were flogged severely or dragged through the water behind a boat until they nearly drowned. Men were treated leniently.

This difference was not the result of a mindless or instinctive sexism. It rested upon the assumption that the bloodline within a family was threatened by a wife’s adultery, but not by the husband’s. (Fischer 299)

Due to Fischer’s dedication to seeking out the root of what seem like strange and unfair cultural behaviors, I finished Albion’s Seed with an understanding that it’s difficult to give any productive criticism to a culture without understanding its own weird internal consistency with its past and present.

Colin Woodard did not get this message from Albion’s Seed.

For every place where Fischer methodically deconstructs folkways to reveal their motivation and connection to the past, Woodard casts aspersions on cultures he dislikes. Which cultures does he dislike? It’s not hard to tell, even reasoning a priori:

Our country’s famed mobility—and the transportations and communications technology that foster it—has been reinforcing, not dissolving, the differences between the nations. … As Americans sort themselves into like-minded communities, they’re also sorting themselves into like-minded nations. (Woodard 17)

Colin Woodard … lives in Portland, Maine. (Woodard, back flap)

It takes Woodard nearly 200 pages, but presentism begins with the least favorite president of nearly every Yankee, Andrew Jackson:

Regarding the Cherokee, he [Jackson] would soon demonstrate contempt for the Constitution he had just sworn to uphold. …

He [Jackson] then drafted and put forward the obscene Indian Removal Bill, a measure to ethnically cleanse the Cherokee and neighboring nations and to relocate them a thousand miles to the west to the arid plains of Oklahoma. (Woodard 196)

In terms of showing contempt for the constitution, Woodard’s decision to single out the president who is considered backcountry elite without mention of, e.g. Lincoln’s unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus without Congressional approval during the Civil War, combined with his use of “obscene” here signals here that he is a good, pious, backcountry settler-hating Yankee. And it’s not just the backcountry, Woodard makes it clear that there’s really nothing good about Dixie culture:

The extreme steps they [members of the Dixie bloc] took to defend their “way of life” [during the Civil Rights integration efforts] laid bare the inhuman, despotic nature of the region’s cherished practices. (Woodard 276)

And lest he forget, the Far West is also riddled with hypocrisy:

The cartels have since made a comeback, in large part by backing political candidates who serve their interests while attacking the Far Westerners’ other historic enemy: the federal government. Where the government was concerned, the popular majority long ago developed a concise agenda: get out, leave us alone, and give us more money. They want dams maintained on the upper Columbia but no regulations protecting salmon. They want Washington to keep providing $2 billion in irrigation subsidies but not try to prevent them being used to exhaust the last of the region’s great ancient aquifers. (Woodard 252)

Towards the end of the book, Woodard starts to fantasize about how the U.S. could be if the Dixie bloc were just gone when he discusses the differences between Canada and the United States:

But what has really made Canada fundamentally different from the United States is that four Anglo nations squared off not against an authoritarian, white supremacist Dixie bloc but rather an extremely open-minded, socially relaxed, socialist-minded society [New France] founded on unusually enlightened ideas about race and multiculturalism. (Woodard 312)

At this point, Woodard has basically laid all his cards on the table, but to make it even more clear, he points to several things that could ruin the Union, none of which are clearly attributable to Yankee culture and many of which are conveniently aspects he has ascribed to the Dixie bloc:

But one thing is certain: if Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law. We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over with their ideas. The union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny. (Woodard 318)

Woodard’s final passages in the book (see Appendix B) read like a love letter to the “First Nation” of Native Americans in Canada, who live in an “environmentally-conscious, communalistic, female-dominated society” (Woodard 321). He unironically includes the following quote:

“It’s a natural thing for a population to run their own country,” says the island’s [Greenland’s] foreign minister, Aleqa Hammond. “We don’t think like Europeans, we don’t look like Europeans, and we’re not from Europe. It’s not that we have bad feelings about Denmark, but it’s a natural thing for a population with its own race and identity to want to cut its strings to foreign rule.” (Woodard 320)

I’m sure he’d be able to explain why the same concept did not apply to the South during the Civil War, despite their similar claims of being a different population due to their Norman ancestry vs. the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the North, ironically, a fact I learned from American Nations.

Conclusion: Bones to Pick

I was severely misguided when I went into American Nations thinking I would get another Albion’s Seed. Even the math doesn’t work; if Woodard spent all of American Nations just discussing the aspects of the eleven cultures he identifies, he would spend 320 / 11 = 30 pages on each, significantly less than Fischer’s average of 784 / 4 = 196 each. This has a cost in loss of nuance in my understanding of cultures; I can really only give a single distinguishing feature of one culture vs. another (e.g. Tidewater emphasized honorable authority, the Deep South emphasized authority). Other differences are a wash.

To be fair, having some ability to distinguish one culture from another at a surface level is an acceptable goal for a book written with a popular audience in mind. American Nations does present some other sticking ideas as well: the dichotomy between the private Protestantism of the Dixie bloc vs. the public Protestantism of the Northern Alliance, the fact that most ethnoregional nations (besides the Yankees) wanted to let the South secede before its attack on Fort Sumter, and attribution of various American platitudes to specific ethnoregional nations (e.g. “melting pot” refers to the Yankee tendency to use schools as vehicles of assimilation for children of immigrants).

My complaints still stand: American Nations does not emulate Albion’s Seed in style, lacks Albion’s Seeds’s nuance, and doesn’t even sufficiently address critiques of Albion’s Seed. That said, the fact that American Nations isn’t American Plantations—the vaporware successor to Albion’s Seed—does not make it a bad book.

It’s not a bad book either because Woodard has a bone to pick. Fischer has his own bone to pick: He rails against materialists who wish to downplay culture’s importance throughout Albion’s Seed, and historical revisionists who wish to reinterpret cultures in a modern context. On reinterpreting the culture of the Delaware Valley:

The culture of the Delaware Valley was dominated by British Quakers and German Pietists whose Christian beliefs had a special moral character. Here again, their culture has been distorted by historical revisionists who have variously “reinterpreted” them as utopian cranks, manipulative materialists, secular pluralists and the “first modern Americans.” The modernity of the Delaware Valley has been much exaggerated, and the primitive Christian roots of William Penn’s “holy experiment” have too often been forgotten. (Fischer 788)

The difference, though, and the reason that American Nations is a bad book, is that Fischer’s rant against interpretations of the folkways he describes is well within the scope of his argument. Woodard’s condemnation of the entire Dixie bloc falls completely outside what a book that claims to be about delivering North America’s ethnoregional nations “into popular consciousness.”

The point here is not that I disagree with Woodard. While I’m still not sure if “American” is one of the top five labels I’d use to describe myself, “Yankee” is—I tend to hold the same values as Woodard does and thus agree that from a modern perspective, many of the things he condemns are bad. My issue is that American Nations masquerades, rather than serves, as a cultural history of the United States, peddling Woodard’s ideology with surface-level justifications instead of attempting to explain to us the context in which people operated so we can at least better understand them and their decisions, even if we still disagree.

This kind of rhetoric is dangerous. Instead of fostering an understanding of cultures that play an important role in determining the political and social trajectory of the United States, Woodard implicitly insists that their values are obviously wrong. Not only is this immature and close-minded, it’s counterproductive: how can we possibly hope to change cultures for the better if we don’t understand their beliefs?

And what if Woodard is wrong? Fischer’s inspiration for writing about the fallacy of presentism is “Whig history”, a name given to the history written by eighteenth and nineteenth century British historians that validated their beliefs. Is Woodard so sure that his beliefs are correct? On private schools in the South:

Many of the private academies whites set up to avoid attending school with blacks were transformed into Christian academies providing “faith-based” education, with an emphasis on conservative values, creationism, and obedience to authority. (The financial burdens these schools place on less-affluent whites prompted evangelical leaders to embrace taxpayer support of these institutions via “school vouchers.”) (Woodard 278)

Woodard condemns school vouchers by association with the Dixie bloc, but economists leaned positive on whether school vouchers would make most students better off shortly after American Nations was published (5% strongly agree, 39% agree, 34% neutral, 5% disagree, 2% no opinion). Here we have another way American Nations is bad: not only does it promote a demonization of an “other”, it gives sloppy, unresearched opinions on policy.

If Woodard’s book were largely ignored, then I would feel content writing this review just as a piece for me to vent into the void. Unfortunately, this has been one of the most sought-after books I’ve ever tried to check out from the San Francisco Public Library, which gives this review a little more relevance.

Availability of _American Nations_ at the San Francisco Public Library. Shows "All copies in use. Holds: 6 on 7 copies"

Availability of _Albion's Seed_ at the San Francisco Public Library. Shows "Available in some locations"

(as of 2017-07-10)

There’s clearly an appetite for a cultural history of the United States, I just hope the readers of American Nations also read something—anything—else. I know a book by David Hackett Fischer that might interest them.

Works Cited

In case it wasn’t clear …

Appendix A: More missing details in American Nations

I didn’t include all the passages I found confusing or lacking detail or context that I wanted to in this review for length considerations. Here are some more from my notes.

Within New Spain—and later, Mexico—the people of El Norte were seen as being more adaptable, self-sufficient, hard-working, aggressive, and intolerant of tyranny. (Woodard 31)

Were these perceptions true? Why were Norteños intolerant of tyranny?

By the eve of the American Revolution, per capita wealth in the Charleston area would reach a dizzying £2,338, more than quadruple that of Tidewater and almost six times higher than that of either New York or Philadelphia. The vast majority of this wealth was concentrated in the hands of South Carolina’s ruling families, who controlled most of the land, trade, and slaves. (Woodard 85)

Fischer includes Gini ratios as empirical evidence of material inequalities for the four folkways he discusses in Albion’s Seed. Lack of one here robs this passage of an important empirical check.

Destitute and land hungry, the vast majority were indeed happy to move straight to the backcountry, where they seized, in the words of a senior colonial official, “any sort of vacant land they can find without asking questions.” Some had a little money left from their passage and could have rented land in settled areas closer to Philadelphia but chose not to. As one explained: “we have been, before we came here, so much oppressed and harassed by under landlords in our own country, from which we with great losses, dangers, and difficulties came [to] … this foreign world [to be] freed from such oppression.” The Scots-Irish, who came in extended families, traveled for days on narrow Indian paths in search of vacant land in the forested hills of what is now south-central Pennsylvania. (Woodard 103)

Seems to contradict:

Borderlanders tolerated enormous inequalities within their communities. In many areas, the wealthiest tenth of the population controlled the majority of the land while the bottom half had none at all and survived as tenants or squatters. (Woodard 105)

The province of Acadia couldn’t participate in any rebellion because the British had wiped it clean off the map and cleansed most of its Francophone population at the start of the Seven Years’ War. (Thousands of these displaced people wound up in the swamps of southern Louisiana, which was still controlled by France at the time; to this day, these Cajuns retain key cultural characteristics of New France.) (Woodard 151)

How did they get there? It’s not exactly close.

President James Madison’s declaration of war against Great Britain in the spring of 1812 finally pushed Yankeedom over the edge. Having effectively allied the federation with Napoleon, the Southerners had, in New England’s view, completed their betrayal of the revolution and revealed their devotion to tyrannical empires. Massachusetts governor Caleb Strong immediately proclaimed a day of public fasting to atone for a war “against the nation from which we are descended, and which for many generations has been the bulwark of our religion.” (Woodard 168)

Seems to contradict:

Nowhere in British America was rebellion more universally supported than in New England the parts of New York and Pennsylvania settled by New Englanders. (Woodard 127)

On the last leg of their journey, they constructed a flotilla of boats to float down the Ohio and named the flagship the Mayflower of the West. Similarly, before settling out to found Vermontville, Michigan, ten families in Addison County, Vermont, joined their Congregational minister in drawing up and signing a written constitution loosely modeled on the Mayflower Compact. (Woodard 176)

But wait, weren’t most Yankees Puritan descendants, not Pilgrim descendants?

Larger wealthier, and more sophisticated than its Deep Southern neighbor, Tidewater had spoken for “the South” on the national stage. Coming from a society that idealized the enlightened rural English gentry, the Tidewater elite expressed regret at the existence of slavery and looked forward to its gradual disappearance. (Woodard 200)

Woodard doesn’t explain why Tidewater wanted to get rid of slavery, though there’s potentially an implicit assumption that their idealization of the enlightened means they were smarter and therefore recognized it as bad. This is problematic in that it projects modern standards of morality onto past societies. Fischer provides a better explanation of why Tidewater disliked slavery: because it inflated the pride of the masters (see “Virginia Rank Ways”, Albion’s Seed).

Seen through the lens of the continent’s ethnoregional nations, the parties’ motivations, allegiances, and behaviors become clearer. One one side was the Deep South and its satellite, Tidewater; on the other, Yankeedom. (Woodard 224)

Yet pure ethnoregional loyalty does not fully explain allegiances in the Civil War:

The attack on Sumter pushed the Appalachian majority in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Indiana, and western Virginia into the Union camp. Other parts of Appalachia rallied to the Confederacy, regarding Lincoln’s call for troops as a direct attack on their communities. (Woodard 238)

In Appalachia, however, such rigid hierarchies [as in the Deep South] had never existed, and free blacks initially had more room to maneuver. Ironically this relative social dynamism triggered a particularly gruesome counterattack in the borderlands. Appalachia’s staggering poverty—made worse by war and economic dislocation—created a situation in which many white Borderlanders found themselves in direct competition with newly freed blacks, who tended to be less deferential than those in the lowlands. The response was the creation of a secret society of homicidal vigilantes called the Ku Klux Klan. (Woodard 266)

Were free blacks actually in competition with free whites, or was this just a perception amplified by the region’s famous xenophobia? Again, empirical indicators and primary sources would help here.

Appendix B: To First Nation, with love, by Colin Woodard

First Nation is a highly communalistic society. Most tribal land in the far north is owned in common under a form of title that prevents it from ever being sold to an individual or exploited in such a way that diminishes its value to future generations. In Greenland there is no private property at all: everyone is allowed to responsibly use the people’s shared land, but it is thought the height of absurdity that any one person should “own” it, which would be comparable to someone’s asserting ownership of the wind. Inuit—whether dwelling in Labrador, Nunavut, Greenland, or Alaska—still hunt, fish, and gather a substantial amount of their food, and all of those “home foods” and the implements associated with them are generally regarded as common property as well. If a hunter kills a seal, it’s handed over to whoever needs it. Villages have communal freezers that anyone can access—free of charge or accounting—because food cannot belong to one person. If the tribe engages in an industrial enterprise, the proceeds belong to everyone.

Not surprisingly, First Nation has an extremely strong environment ethic. In Canada—where a revolutionary 1999 supreme court decision recognized Indian oral histories as legitimate evidence in establishing precolonial territories—aboriginal people are setting the terms by which oil, gas, mining, and timber companies have to abide. the 2,000-person Innu nation in Labrador has created a top-notch, ecosystem-based forestry management plan for their ancestral lands in Labrador, which at 17.5 million acres, are larger than West Virginia. They hired professional forest ecologists to identify areas that shouldn’t be cut for the good of wildlife and water quality and added their own hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds. In the end, 60 percent of their territory was placed off-limits to loggers; the rest is sustainably harvested for the good of the collective nation. Similar interventions have resulted in a 57.6-million-acre forestry plan for Kaska lands in northern British Columbia and the Yukon and a new national park and wildlife refuge in the Northwest Territories that is eleven times the size of Yellowstone. “There’s a new game in town where First Nations are driving outcomes across the board and trying to achieve a balance between their land, history, the modern economy, and the future,” says Larry Innes, who has worked with tribes across the Canadian north as director of the Canadian Boreal Initiative, an environment initiative financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Canada is really one of the last, best places where we can get the balance right.”

In both Canada and Greenland the Inuit have been at the forefront of the climate change battle, as warmer temperatures are already disrupting their way of life. In Ilulissat and other northern Greenland settlements, hunters are reluctantly giving up their sled dog teams because sea ice no longer forms in winter. (You can’t travel by “land” in Greenland because rugged mountains and mile-tall glacier fronts block every route.) Alaskan villages have already had to be moved to escape the advancing sea and melting permafrost. Polar bears and other game are vanishing. Meanwhile drug abuse, alcoholism, and teen suicide have become endemic. “In one lifetime, our way of life has been transformed,” says Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Nunavut, whose climate change work as chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council earned her a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nomination. “We’ve been seeing the breakdown of our society.”

Greenlanders, for one, have decided the best way to move forward is to be masters of their own destiny. In 2009 they achieved a state of near-independence from Denmark following a self-rule referendum supported by 76 percent of voters. Greenlanders now control the criminal justice, social welfare, and health-care systems, land-use planning, fisheries management, and environmental regulations, education, transportation, and even the issuance of offshore oil exploration contracts. “It’s a natural thing for a population to run their own country,” says the island’s foreign minister, Aleqa Hammond. “We don’t think like Europeans, we don’t look like Europeans, and we’re not from Europe. It’s not that we have bad feelings about Denmark, but it’s a natural thing for a population with its own race and identity to want to cut its strings to foreign rule.” Securing independence won’t be easy, she admits, given that the country is still dependent on Danish government subsidies to maintain its government, hospitals, and generous social welfare system. But she believes Greenlanders have a secret weapon. “You’ll notice here in Greenland that the women are very strong, not only physically strong, but in all respects: in politics, business, education level and everything,” she says, adding that roughly half the island’s parliament is female. “Our bishop is a woman, most mayors are women and so forth. there’s never been a fight for gender equality in Greenland. Women have always been powerful in our society. Our God was a female, and when the Christians came to Greenland [in the eighteenth century] and said ‘our God is mighty and great and he looks like us,’ our first reaction was: a He? Because not only are our women smarter and more pretty than men, they also give birth, they give life, and when there are problems in society, the women are the ones who are fighting to be sure the society survives. The Inuit language has no difference between he or she, or between mankind and animal,” she adds. “They are all equal.”

Communalistic, environmentally-minded, and female-dominated, the people of First Nation will have a very different approach to the global challenges of the twenty-first century from that of the other nations of the continent and the world. And starting in Greenland, First Nation is building a series of national-states of its own, giving North America’s indigenous peoples a chance to show the rest of the world how they would blend post-modern life with premodern folkways. (Woodard 319-321)