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

               I still don’t really know how to feel about this book. I think the best way that I can put it is that Woodard has some really interesting insights, though he creates an argument about the “eleven regions” that has a lot of holes. Basically, there’s a lot of good an a lot of bad in this book. The foremost sin is that he includes nothing about Florida! WTF! He just eliminates us from the book and I thought that was super lame. There are extremely brief references to northern Florida a few times but we’re basically just not in this book and half of Florida isn’t even assigned to one of his eleven regions. I question off the bat if regional/geographic divisions are the most important divisions in the United States, an implicit assumption of the book, rather than racial differences or urban/rural differences, which I think are likely bigger.

               One really good thing about the book is the way that the author divides the country into more specific and logical blocks than North and South or Coastal States and Flyover States. The best distinction made is between the regions of “Tidewater” and the “Deep South,” pointing out the Tidewater, the aristocratic region home to Jefferson, Washington, and Madison that had tobacco plantations, declined in influence throughout the 18^th century, and thought of slavery as an embarrassment. The Deep South, on the other hand, founded by Barbadian slavers, was always proud of slavery and saw it as a positive good. Therefore, the reason why slavery went from being seen as an embarrassment to a source of pride from the American Revolution into the 1800’s and culminating in the Civil War was not due to a change of opinion. Rather, it was that those who argued rose to and fell from prominence- the Tidewater tobacco farmers who felt shame became less powerful as Deep South slavers became more prominent, farming cotton, the new cash crop that made them richer and made slaves all the more profitable. The author even distinguishes between the social lives of planters in Tidewater and the Deep South, pointing out that since Tidewater had rivers that made doorstep delivery to plantations possible, the Deep South did not, and as a result, Tidewater developed no major cities while the Deep South created Charleston. Deep South planters went to Charleston to have a good time in the city and often lived there while Tidewater planters stayed in their mansions.

               Another interesting distinction between Yankee and Appalachian Midwesterners, who met in the West having come from the different regions. They spoke, as a result, with different dialects. They also had different customs. Woodard writes, “Yankee Midwesterners placed their homes on the road, ate potatoes as their starch, planted fruit orchards, built barns and straight board fences, harnessed their horses to carts for a race, negotiated written contracts, and buried their dead in town graveyards. Appalachian Midwesterners built their homes near the center of their plots (for privacy), preferred corn as their starch, spurned orchards, built open sheds if they sheltered their livestock at all, enclosed pastures with split-rail fences, rode their horses when racing, negotiated verbal, honor-bound agreements, and put their relatives to rest in family plots or isolated graves.” While the Yankees were more community-based and sought to build utopian communities based on good works and righteousness, the people from Appalachia were more about individual salvation and a “bilateral relationship with God.”

               The worst thing about this book is the total lack of discussion of black people/slaves and their descendants. Where do they fit in as a nation? Woodard ignores them mostly, and they clearly do not fit in with the other “nations” described in the book. That annoyed me. He did the same with Native Americans until the conclusion of the book, when, all of a sudden, he jumps to talking about them and about Canada, which was a strange ending. In sum, this book has interesting things to contribute, but does not adequately address all the threads that are brought up.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Constitution was only approved in 1788 by a 30-27 vote. That is really close!
• “Being sold down the river,” originally referred to slaves sold from Kentucky and Tennessee down to the Deep South, as the international slave trade had become illegal, forcing Deep Southern slavers to import human property from other US states.
• Mexico’s war of independence killed one in ten of its people and cut its GNP in half. GNP would not recover to 1805 levels until the 1870s.
• New York City was one quarter Jewish in 1910.