Colin Woodard Read Online Free PDF

map immediately preceding this Introduction has boundaries based on the core and domain of each nation circa 2010. If we added each nation’s sphere, there would be a great deal of overlap, with multiple nations projecting influence over southern Louisiana, central Texas, western Québec, or greater Baltimore. These boundaries are not set in stone: they’ve shifted before and they’ll undoubtedly shift again as each nation’s influence waxes and wanes. Culture is always on the move. 10
    Delve deeply into almost any particular locality and you’ll likely find plenty of minority enclaves or even micronations embedded within the major ones I’ve outlined here. One could argue that the Mormons have created a separate nation in the heart of the Far West, or that Milwaukee is a Midlander city stranded in the midst of the Yankee Midwest. You might argue for the Kentucky Bluegrass Country being a Tidewater enclave embedded in Greater Appalachia, or that the Navajo have developed a nation-state in the Far West. There’s a distinct Highland Scots culture on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island and on North Carolina’s Cape Fear peninsula. One could write an entire book about the acute cultural and historical differences between “Yankee core” Maine and Massachusetts—indeed, this is a subject I treated in The Lobster Coast (2004). Digging into regional cultures can be like peeling an onion. I’ve stopped where I have because I believe the values, attitudes, and political preferences of my eleven nations truly dominate the territories they’ve been assigned, trumping the implications of finer-grain analysis.
    I’ve also intentionally chosen not to discuss several other nations that influence the continent but whose core territories lie outside what is now the United States and Canada. Cuban-dominated South Florida is the financial and transportation hub of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Hawaii is part of the greater Polynesian cultural nation and was once a nation-state of its own. Central Mexico and Central America are, of course, part of the North American continent and include perhaps a halfdozen distinct nations—Hispano-Aztec, Greater Mayan, Anglo-Creole, and so on. There are even scholars who make persuasive arguments that African American culture constitutes the periphery of a larger Creole nation with its core in Haiti and a domain extending over much of the Caribbean basin and on to Brazil. These regional cultures are certainly worthy of exploration, but as a practical matter, a line needed to be drawn somewhere. Washington, D.C., is also an anomaly: a gigantic political arena for the staging of intranational blood-sport competitions, where one team prefers to park their cars in the Tidewater suburbs, the other in the Midland ones.
    Finally, I’d like to underscore the fact that becoming a member of a nation usually has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with culture. a One doesn’t inherit a national identity the way one gets hair, skin, or eye color; one acquires it in childhood or, with great effort, through voluntary assimilation later in life. Even the “blood” nations of Europe support this assertion. A member of the (very nationalistic) Hungarian nation might be descended from Austrian Germans, Russian Jews, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, or any combination thereof, but if he speaks Hungarian and embraces Hungarian-ness, he’s regarded as being just as Hungarian as any “pure-blooded” Magyar descendant of King Árpád. In a similar vein, nobody would deny French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Frenchness, even though his father was a Hungarian noble and his maternal grandfather a Greek-born Sephardic Jew. b The same is true of the North American nations: if you talk like a Midlander, act like a Midlander, and think like a Midlander, you’re probably a Midlander, regardless of whether your parents or grandparents