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What it argues
American Nations is Colin Woodard's argument that North America is not a single nation but a continent of 11 distinct regional cultures, each founded by different waves of settlers with different values, institutions, and political philosophies, and that understanding those foundational cultures is more useful for explaining American political conflict than the standard red-state/blue-state framing. Woodard is a Maine-based journalist and historian, and the book draws on four centuries of colonial, demographic, and political history.
Woodard's eleven nations—Yankeedom, the Midlands, New Netherland, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, El Norte, the Left Coast, the Far West, New France, and First Nation—are defined not by current state lines but by settlement origins. Yankees brought a Puritan ethic of community improvement and consensus; Scots-Irish settlers from the borderlands of Britain created a culture of fierce individualism and distrust of centralized authority across Greater Appalachia; Dutch and English merchant settlers created a pluralistic commercial culture in what became New York. Each of these foundational cultures, Woodard argues, has been remarkably persistent across 400 years.
What it gets right
- 1.
The US is not one nation but eleven regional cultures, each with distinct founding values that have persisted more than 400 years despite migration, urbanization, and mass media.
- 2.
State lines are not cultural lines. Understanding Appalachian Pennsylvania as closer in culture to Appalachian Kentucky than to Philadelphia is more illuminating than comparing states.
- 3.
The Deep South's foundational culture was explicitly modeled on Caribbean slave societies: hierarchical, hostile to democracy, and built around the interests of a landed oligarchy. That inheritance has not been fully shed.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Colin Woodard is an American journalist and historian based in Maine. He is the author of several books on American history and politics, including The Lobster Coast, The Republic of Pirates, and Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. American Nations, published in 2011, became widely assigned in college history and political science courses. He has been a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and other outlets and writes regularly on history, politics, and the environment. He teaches at the University of Maine.
