Free Colin Woodard by American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

cultures on this side of the pond. One of Fischer’s more recent works, Champlain’s Dream (2008), did much the same for New France. Russell Shorto’s excellent Island at the Center of the World (2004) brought the Dutch period of New York’s history alive and argued for its lasting impact on the culture of the Big Apple—a thesis I heartily endorse. Kevin Phillips’s prophetic 1969 study The Emerging Republican Majority identified many of the key fault lines between regional cultures and used them to predict four decades of American political developments; two of his later works— The Cousins’ Wars (1999) and American Theocracy (2006)—draw on regional differences in exploring Anglo-American relations and the decline of American power respectively. In Made in Texas (2004), a scathing attack on the Dixification of American politics, Michael Lind identifies regional tensions between what I would call the Appalachian and Deep Southern sections of his home state, and some of their salient policy differences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
    Among the more technical scholarly works, a few stand out. Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Cultural Geography of the United States (1973) developed useful concepts for mapping and analyzing regional cultures. Raymond Gastil’s Cultural Regions of the United States (1975) fleshed out regional variations in a variety of subjects and social indicators. Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (1969) by Donald W. Meinig used similar approaches to examine the oft-discussed cultural fissures in Texas. Frederick Merk’s History of the Westward Movement (1978) and Henry Glassie’s Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968) are invaluable in tracing settlement flows.
    Another set of works shed light on important aspects of particular nations. E. Digby Baltzell—scholar of the American elite—compared and contrasted the cultures of the leading families of the intellectual capitals of Yankeedom and the Midlands in his exhaustive 1979 study, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia . For understanding El Norte’s Spanish heritage, David J. Weber’s Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) and The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (1982) provide essential background. Rhys Issac’s The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (1982) describes the Tidewater gentry’s world at its apogee in wonderful detail. For New Netherland in the Dutch era, I recommend Oliver A. Rink’s 1986 study Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York . On the Deep South and the Barbadian system on which it was first modeled, turn to Richard S. Dunn’s 1972 study Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 and his April 1971 paper “English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina” in the South Carolina Historical Magazine . The classic—and very chilling—academic examination of Deep Southern culture in the early twentieth century is Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Case and Class , published by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago in 1941. On the spread of the nations into the Midwest and the implications thereof see especially Richard Power, Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of The Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest (1953); Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (1970); and Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (1996). For the Far West and Left Coast, start with Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (1986), David Alan Johnson’s Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840–1890 (1992), and Kevin Starr’s, Americans and the California Dream,