Some additional context: Colin Woodard wrote American Nations (https://bookshop.org/p/books/american-nations-a-history-of-t...) a bit over a decade ago, which goes into much more detail on these groupings. By and large, he’s drawing lines by immigration patterns - which areas were originally settled by which peoples, and how did that affect the cultures of those regions. It’s an interesting book and an interesting lens - you can nitpick on the sub-district level, but I think the overall thesis has some explanatory power.
Second American Nations. I take issue with, in parts of it he has an elitist, typical Yankee patronizing tone against the South, but overall it’s well done work. As far as I know, it is the most comprehensive work in highlighting the diversity in culture and history of the US, and why we appear to be so divisive.
If you read news and opinion articles from the early 1900’s you’ll find that many authors are saying the same thing as people say today. In context of American Nations, the answer is “we’ve always been like that.”
> I take issue with, in parts of it he has an elitist, typical Yankee patronizing tone against the South, but overall it’s well done work
I'm not sure why anyone should expect the South to escape criticism for defining itself on racialized chattel slavery; fighting a war largely to preserve that system; having Jim Crow, lynching, etc.; continuing into the modern day to wish to rename things in favor of treasonous Confederates; being literal economic deadweight that benefits from an influx of tax dollars from Blue states (Yankee states, and "Left Coast", in this nations model) via the Federal government, even while voting against "s0cIALism" and constantly denigrating Yankee and Left Coast cities and states.
I'd love to support non-amazon book sellers, but it's very hard when the paperback from Amazon is $19 and the paperback from two of the sellers listed in your link are $40 and $47.
AND I would love to use something other than goodreads for book reviews, but storygraph doesn't let you sort or filter reviews. And you can't even see the date that the review was published. Oof.
Did I miss it or is there no methodology description justifying how they reached this?
If there was some good standard survey on cultural views, you could compare geo regions on the summary stats of their responses, and cluster them. But you'd need a _huge_ number of responses to get good county-level data. And then I think we'd expect to see lots of county-to-county differences reflecting the urban-rural contours, immigration differences tied to industry, etc, rather than these big, uninterrupted regions. E.g. I would think King County, WA and Alameda County, CA have a lot more in common with each other than either does with Del Norte County, CA.
You didn’t miss it, because there was no methodology to speak of. Colin Woodard isn’t a sociologist or historian, he is a reporter for the Maine Sunday Telegram who wrote a book premised on the idea that the arc of 300-400 years of culture and history of the various regions of the US are cleanly defined entirely by the initial groups that settled them. Every region has a stupid, manufactured brand (it’s not the West Coast and New England, it’s the “Left Coast” and “Yankeedom”). What little data that is referenced is cherry picked to support the narratives. It’s also hilariously patronizing (spoiler: The reporter from Maine concludes that New England and the West Coast are the epitome of all that is clean and good, and everyone else are barbarians and unwashed rubes).
It is closer to a Buzzfeed quiz explaining how your astrological sign dictates your Hogwarts House than anything remotely resembling academic rigor.
i'd like to see more methods, because that Midlands region looks similar to the types of artifacts I used to get doing various unsupervised learning projects.
that shape screams "there are a couple of clear clusters nearby, and this is the leftover 'in-between' space we didn't know how to handle so we made a new cluster"
I thought this too, it seems to be a map of who the original people were to the region (including cases where major immigrant groups who created the region), but none of the methodology is listed or really makes sense, making it not very useful. Seems rich of the author though to suggest the region he's from is deeply complex, while the regions he isn't from are painted with a broad brush
No, I saw that page and it doesn't say anything meaningful about how they arrived at this. It says _that_ they expanded the model, and various notes about resolution, they use to communicate the labeling they arrived at -- but nothing meaningful about the input data used, any statistical methodology, etc.
> my Motivf colleagues and I refined the ad hoc models and produced what you might call the “official” American Nations Model spreadsheets for the United States, mapping the regional cultures at county-level resolution.
> This summer, we’ve expanded the analytical model to the rest of North America covered in American Nations.
I've read the book and it's interesting. I don't recall him explicitly explaining the methodology and so I had the same question - from that link it sounds like the methodology was more ad hoc originally but now it's on more of a solid quantitative footing.
I really wish that authors of such projects would use a population-weighted cartogram instead of a land-area map. Some of the most-populous and culturally relevant "nations" would jump out on such a map instead of being tiny.
Tbh, I can't speak to a lot of the regions on here, but the grouping of "Greater Appalachia" is so wild. The idea that mid-Indiana, west-Texas, and eastern Tennessee have anything in common, from a cultural, immigration, quality of life, anything perspective, has to have been an idea proposed by someone who has only read books about those regions.
I can see the similarities between Amarillo and Knoxville. Every city on I-40 feels similar to me until Albuquerque, having spent time in a number of Tennessee cities and having to visit wife's hometown in Texas.
Low key writing this has made me realize how much of my life has just been migrating up and down I-40.
What shared traits do you see between Amarillo and Knoxville? Having visited both, Amarillo is distinctly High Plains/Western while Knoxville is Appalachian. Different cultures, geography, everything.
Family goes to a non-denominational evangelical church in Knoxville, family goes to a non-denominational evangelical church in Amarillo. Both would probably be the same denomination but its unpopular to claim a denomination these days. After church its dinner that's a meat + 2 vegetables and cornbread. There's a big ford in each driveway that hasn't hauled more than dogs and kids since the day it came home. Maybe its just my biases but I just did not have any culture shock outside of how long it takes to drive anywhere out west.
> There's a big ford in each driveway that hasn't hauled more than dogs and kids since the day it came home
I can't speak on Knoxville because I've only spent a day there, but I've spent a good bit of time around Amarillo mostly from driving between CO and TX over a hundred times, although not really in the suburbs.
Saw a lot of beat up trucks that looked like they were owned by blue collar folks and used for truck things. But of course there's also plenty of brodozers, which I'm assuming are also fairly common in Knoxville.
I was just saying two middle class families living a thousand miles away from each other along I-40 were fairly similar to me. They are also considered in the same nation according to this map.
The only part of this map I'd quibble with based on personal experience is Birmingham, AL (and Jefferson County) is definitely in that same Greater Appalachia nation because I can't in my heart of hearts say it and Dothan, AL have anything in common. The most interesting thing in Dothan is a hardware store.
As someone that grew up partly in Southern Illinois with lots of relatives in Southern Indiana I can tell you they have a great deal in common. Both regions are very "southern" culturally, with very distinct accents.
Illinois is an interesting place as it features large changes in culture from north to south. I was born in Northern Illinois and lived there until I was 10 when I moved 5 hours south. There is an enormous cultural difference. As the map shows Northern Illinois is part of the "Midlands" with a flat/generic accent whereas the Southern Illinois/Southern Indiana accent sounds a lot like Woody Harrelson's (who was born in Texas). The greater Chicagoland area is its own thing, the map shows it part of Yankeedom but I disagree - I lived in Chicago twice in my 20s and I've lived in Yankeedom (Massachusetts) for 25 years now and I don't see much similarity. I'd group far northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota in their own group, maybe called the "Opers"
Thinking about the map as monocultures is disingenuous. They have cultural focuses in common (among other things), which does not make them the same culture. Notably, these regions do not vote the same. It's not a party alignment map.
What "cultural focuses" are shared between the ranchers of the far west (e.g. the Bundy family), the Mormons of the high desert, a dozen indigenous nations speaking entirely different language families, and the gold rush immigrants of the Yukon?
That's like 90% of rural America though. I've lived in various rural areas and they were invariably majority very pro gun, at least in the south and western USA. Northeast is more of a hodge podge on 2nd amendment though, and you have to go deeper into rural areas for stronger support.
And yet the Navajo Nation bordering both of them has fairly strict gun registries. Both of those are yet different than the situation in Alberta (more similar to TX), and YT more resembles Alaskan gun culture.
They're obviously not related by immigration group either. The Hopi descend from early first nations. The Navajo descend from the athabascan migrations. Yukon comes from Canadian and British gold rush populations. Alberta comes from various prairie settler efforts, including Ukrainian Canadians. The Mormons were their own settlement group in Mexico that went to war with many of the (now-) surrounding indigenous nations. Etc.
And this is just one "American nation". The same basic issue exists in all of them.
> And yet the Navajo Nation bordering both of them has fairly strict gun registries.
The fact there are political differences by region is not a defining factor, or the regions would look very different. The fact it is a cultural topic at all, looks to be one common factor. I feel like I'm talking in circles now.
Regardless, I really don't understand this sort of hair splitting. My imagination isn't that expansive, yet I can understand how these regions might have been determined in many cases. Asking the authors might get answers to these kinds of questions.
The ubiquity of Subarus, the BLM signs in front yards & the pride stickers don't convince you? Ever drive an hour or two away from the coast and notice the difference?
I agree. However, I will say that I always thought that Southern Indiana and Southern Ohio were more similar than Southern Indiana and Northern Indiana.
King George’s royal proclamation of 1763 established the “Indian Reserve” covering most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. European colonists were prohibited from trespassing - only a small number of British military outposts were allowed. Just a short time before the revolution, it got organized as part of Quebec.
Early in the revolution, it was taken by the colonists who declared it “Illinois County, Virginia” and allowed people to stream in and claim their homesteads (Note that the northern part was claimed by Connecticut as their own “Western Reserve”). Essentially all of southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois was settled by people crossing the river from Kentucky, so it makes a lot of sense that you’d think that the southern parts of all these states seem more similar to each other than they are to their northern neighbors.
The next section north seems to have been mostly dominated by folks from the mid-Atlantic - Virginia, etc. And further north dominated by people that arrived on sailing ships, especially from New York. New Buffalo Michigan refers to Buffalo New York ;)
Anyway, it seems kind of weird that these states seem geographically oriented north-south but culturally oriented east-west. But the fact that they were depopulated (of Europeans) and then repopulated (by Europeans) gives an explanation of that, especially with the transportation available at the time of repopulation (of Europeans).
There's obviously never going to be one right answer to any kind of spatial taxonomy of cultures, but if the methodology is thoughtful and makes you think about the shared or differing cultural properties, it can be interesting.
The Tri-State area (NY-NJ-Conn.) as New Netherland, I like it. It isn't NYS and it isn't south Jersey. I'd say create it tomorrow in a tri-state compact.
These are always kind of fun to contemplate - in part because everyone immediately jumps in with ways that they are wrong.
For instance where I live in Deschutes County, Oregon... physically, yeah, we are in that 'far west' region, but have a lot of cultural and economic ties to Oregon and even California west of the mountains.
Yeah, this weirdly splits the Atlanta metro area in half between two regions based on the counties, and while north Atlanta and south Atlanta metro have decidedly differing cultures (along mostly but not entirely racial lines) the split is completely arbitrary on county lines with Fulton County, GA jutting upwards as if the 10 miles across that county don't represent anything on either side of it
Fulton County is a weird shape for historical reasons - it absorbed the counties to its north and south during the Depression - and historically the northern part of Fulton County (everything north of the Chattahoochee River) was Milton County. If Milton County still existed it would probably end up in Woodard's "Greater Appalachia" over "Deep South".
We can ignore current settlement patterns because Woodard does. In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...) he does explain the methodology, although I don't have access - but from the snippets I can see it appears that he's essentially trying to work out who the first European settlers in each area were. So it doesn't matter that north Fulton County is full of carpetbaggers from up North and immigrants. (I write this as I sit in an office in north Fulton County; I am a carpetbagger from up North and many of my co-workers are immigrants.)
It makes sense for the split to be along county lines just because a lot of data will be available at the county level, but it occasionally produces absurd results. I occasionally have mocked these splits as "I drive to Appalachia for ramen", because I used to live in DeKalb County about a mile from the DeKalb-Gwinnett county line - according to Woodard's map, DeKalb is "Deep South" and Gwinnett is "Appalachia" - and I liked a ramen place just over the county line. (Since then both I and the ramen place have moved.)
Maybe I misinterpreted what this is supposed to show. Is this based on data from like 150 years ago or is it based on how things are today?
This is similar to something I saw on reddit over the weekend which was a similar map but based on local cuisine. I live in North Fulton County now, but I'm originally from central Alabama and the dividing line for the cuisine was between "soul food" and whatever other term they had come up for deep fried food
Basically it was white people southern food vs. black people southern food (which, at the end of the day is actually not that different)
curious if this Appalachia vs. "Deep South" thing is really just a racial divide in the data with "Deep South" being African American descendants of slaves across the Black Belt and Appalachia being the more white population
The map in this post is historically based, I think, but they don't say that very loudly.
And definitely some of what we're seeing in this data is a racial divide - but the racial divide in the South goes back to where slave-based agriculture was and was not viable.
I'd imagine all the borders are fuzzy, but maybe that's the only spot where a broad enough area was that way to note it.
I live pretty much on the border between two regions on the map, and you can definitely see a difference just driving one county north or south. But of course you also see exceptions on both sides, in both individual homes or small towns that seem more suited for the other side of the border.
The criteria is dominant ancestry source. Loyalists generally came from the red area and dark green areas of the US, but that'd be confusing recursion if Canadian regions were defined as where in the US people came from vs US regions being defined by where in Europe they came from.
notable nitpick: calling DC a “federal entity” is mixing up the concepts of nation and state. (It’s also major erasure of the culture of people - mostly Black - who actually live there!)
The whole section around DC is..questionable. PG, Fairfax, and Loudoun counties are all in the Tidewater group that extends down to the NC triangle. Meanwhile Montgomery County, which is right over the Potomoc from Fairfax/Loudoun, is in a separate group that's shared with Philadelphia and Ohio? MoCo, Fairfax, and Loudoun are all incredibly similar both culturally and economically (i.e. wealthy DC suburbanites) and should either all be in the Tidewater category or in some separate "Capital Area" nation.
I'm not sure I'd extend it that far, but personally I could see at least to Woodbridge.
Another comment mentions this is based at least partially off original settlement/immigration patterns so I'm willing to be more leniant now, but at the very least inside the Beltway should be Federal entity/Capital area.
and my first though is "What's different about South Dakota and North Dakota" and got told by a friend who's a geography nerd that much of South Dakota is really weird and isolated and different from other states.
Agreed. What the western parts of this map avoids is that the cultures are a mix of mostly descendent European cultures (Norwegian, Irish, German, etc.) and Hispanic cultures especially in the south differs strongly once you go north of Colorado.
Any cultural grouping that claims Humboldt and Tahoe aren't more closely related to each other than either are to the central valley is quite wrong. California pretty cleanly splits into 4 cultural regions: SoCal, The Bay, The Central Valley, and the Mountain Folk.
If you posterize enough to get to a map this course, then you'd have "The Left Coast" running down the Sierras, with parts of Klamath and Cascade Ranges (notably excepting the Shasta corner, which is more closely related to the Klan country side of Oregon). This can be somewhat justified, if one argues that the difference between the cultural ideas of the Bay Area are just urban versions of those that occupy the mountains (oddly harmonious mix of hippies and libertarians vs. the Bay's coexistence of corporate libertarians and progressives).
The fact that German and Scandinavian heavy Minnesota and Wisconsin are Yankeedom and much more culturally aligned with Massachusetts instead of much of the Dakotas rubs me the wrong way.
And the "Far West" is an absolute cop-out, and calling Central Texas culturally "central Appalachia" is completely ridiculous.
This seems like a much saner breakdown of the US into mega-regions. Feels much more intuitive and doesn't involve wacky stuff like grouping Philadelphia; the Oklahoma panhandle; and Mooseknuckle, Ontario together.
The “Far West” (terrible name) seems to be just a lazy grouping of most of the area west of the Mississippi. Definitely has a very costal biased view of the world.
Really weird to not list Deseret as its own thing honestly (all of Utah, Colorado west of the Divide, Idaho up to Rexburg, most of Nevada that isn't Tahoe/Reno/Vegas)
I've seen this called the "Mormon corridor" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_corridor) but Deseret is a catchier name. Sometimes that includes Vegas, though - Vegas is historically Mormon.
I'm reminded of the children's book Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport, the first half of which is some kid's stereotypes of what life is like "Out West" (including the title). Then his family completes the move "Out West", and finds that things are quite a bit different from how he expects.
Marrying a woman from Louisiana has been similarly instructive to me as regards "the South".
«First Nations (French: Premières Nations) is a term used to identify Indigenous peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis.»
If you can make space for New Netherland, it doesn't make any sense to collapse all northern native cultures together, when they are just as or even more diverse than the US east cost.
Was just about to type this comment. Allegedly, the guy who came up with the term “First Nations” was from a group (Athabaskan? I don’t remember) who were historically at war with the Inuit, so he left them out. Pretty ridiculous. I’m pretty sure everyone involved would be annoyed at getting grouped together into the same “nation”.
I knew there was a reason I loved New Orleans. I love to go there and imagine what America could have been with French food, culture, and taste, instead of what actually happened. British food, no culture, no taste, Crocs and pajama pants at McDonald's.
There are, uh, plenty of crocs and pajama pants at the many New Orleans McDonald's locations.
I also don't think the US ended up absorbing much British cuisine, certainly native food(s) and immigrant waves have contributed much more than England.
Culinary traditions are far more recent than Europeans pretend they are. Anything with corn, potatoes or tomatoes is necessarily less than 500 years old.
Some additional context: Colin Woodard wrote American Nations (https://bookshop.org/p/books/american-nations-a-history-of-t...) a bit over a decade ago, which goes into much more detail on these groupings. By and large, he’s drawing lines by immigration patterns - which areas were originally settled by which peoples, and how did that affect the cultures of those regions. It’s an interesting book and an interesting lens - you can nitpick on the sub-district level, but I think the overall thesis has some explanatory power.
Second American Nations. I take issue with, in parts of it he has an elitist, typical Yankee patronizing tone against the South, but overall it’s well done work. As far as I know, it is the most comprehensive work in highlighting the diversity in culture and history of the US, and why we appear to be so divisive.
If you read news and opinion articles from the early 1900’s you’ll find that many authors are saying the same thing as people say today. In context of American Nations, the answer is “we’ve always been like that.”
> I take issue with, in parts of it he has an elitist, typical Yankee patronizing tone against the South, but overall it’s well done work
I'm not sure why anyone should expect the South to escape criticism for defining itself on racialized chattel slavery; fighting a war largely to preserve that system; having Jim Crow, lynching, etc.; continuing into the modern day to wish to rename things in favor of treasonous Confederates; being literal economic deadweight that benefits from an influx of tax dollars from Blue states (Yankee states, and "Left Coast", in this nations model) via the Federal government, even while voting against "s0cIALism" and constantly denigrating Yankee and Left Coast cities and states.
Renaming things in favor of Confederates is actually being pushed from the guy from NY, to be fair.
Go back to "The Nine Nations Of North America" by Joel Garreau in 1981.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer...
A better way to understand the cultural differences in the U.S. https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultura...
Non-Amazon link for Albion’s Seed: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/01bed638-8991-4afe-a530-...
Thanks. It’s not an affiliate link it’s just the first one that popped up.
No worries, I don’t look down on people for posting links I disagree with :P. Instead I want to demonstrate there are other sources.
I'd love to support non-amazon book sellers, but it's very hard when the paperback from Amazon is $19 and the paperback from two of the sellers listed in your link are $40 and $47.
Here's a non-Amazon metasearch site for independent book sellers. There's copies starting as low as $11.
https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=Albion%27...
AND I would love to use something other than goodreads for book reviews, but storygraph doesn't let you sort or filter reviews. And you can't even see the date that the review was published. Oof.
Great book and a great shortened synopsis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-se...
This is not correct at all for Alaska.
It is very much: Left Coast, First Nation, Texas, in that order.
At least for other places in the US I've been, this map seems to hold up! Curious what others think of it.
Did I miss it or is there no methodology description justifying how they reached this?
If there was some good standard survey on cultural views, you could compare geo regions on the summary stats of their responses, and cluster them. But you'd need a _huge_ number of responses to get good county-level data. And then I think we'd expect to see lots of county-to-county differences reflecting the urban-rural contours, immigration differences tied to industry, etc, rather than these big, uninterrupted regions. E.g. I would think King County, WA and Alameda County, CA have a lot more in common with each other than either does with Del Norte County, CA.
You didn’t miss it, because there was no methodology to speak of. Colin Woodard isn’t a sociologist or historian, he is a reporter for the Maine Sunday Telegram who wrote a book premised on the idea that the arc of 300-400 years of culture and history of the various regions of the US are cleanly defined entirely by the initial groups that settled them. Every region has a stupid, manufactured brand (it’s not the West Coast and New England, it’s the “Left Coast” and “Yankeedom”). What little data that is referenced is cherry picked to support the narratives. It’s also hilariously patronizing (spoiler: The reporter from Maine concludes that New England and the West Coast are the epitome of all that is clean and good, and everyone else are barbarians and unwashed rubes).
It is closer to a Buzzfeed quiz explaining how your astrological sign dictates your Hogwarts House than anything remotely resembling academic rigor.
i'd like to see more methods, because that Midlands region looks similar to the types of artifacts I used to get doing various unsupervised learning projects.
that shape screams "there are a couple of clear clusters nearby, and this is the leftover 'in-between' space we didn't know how to handle so we made a new cluster"
I thought this too, it seems to be a map of who the original people were to the region (including cases where major immigrant groups who created the region), but none of the methodology is listed or really makes sense, making it not very useful. Seems rich of the author though to suggest the region he's from is deeply complex, while the regions he isn't from are painted with a broad brush
No, it's not in the text at the original link, however, yes, there is a link to the full article in the blurb with the how: https://www.nationhoodlab.org/the-american-nations-regions-a...
No, I saw that page and it doesn't say anything meaningful about how they arrived at this. It says _that_ they expanded the model, and various notes about resolution, they use to communicate the labeling they arrived at -- but nothing meaningful about the input data used, any statistical methodology, etc.
> my Motivf colleagues and I refined the ad hoc models and produced what you might call the “official” American Nations Model spreadsheets for the United States, mapping the regional cultures at county-level resolution.
> This summer, we’ve expanded the analytical model to the rest of North America covered in American Nations.
There's an entire book from the author on this topic [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cul...
I've read the book and it's interesting. I don't recall him explicitly explaining the methodology and so I had the same question - from that link it sounds like the methodology was more ad hoc originally but now it's on more of a solid quantitative footing.
I really wish that authors of such projects would use a population-weighted cartogram instead of a land-area map. Some of the most-populous and culturally relevant "nations" would jump out on such a map instead of being tiny.
My favorite mapbuilder of this sort is using https://pitchinteractiveinc.github.io/tilegrams/
This reminds me of an old SF book, Ecotopia, where the west coast of the USA secedes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia
Wow, hadn't thought about that book in years (the action takes place in 1999!).
Tbh, I can't speak to a lot of the regions on here, but the grouping of "Greater Appalachia" is so wild. The idea that mid-Indiana, west-Texas, and eastern Tennessee have anything in common, from a cultural, immigration, quality of life, anything perspective, has to have been an idea proposed by someone who has only read books about those regions.
I can see the similarities between Amarillo and Knoxville. Every city on I-40 feels similar to me until Albuquerque, having spent time in a number of Tennessee cities and having to visit wife's hometown in Texas.
Low key writing this has made me realize how much of my life has just been migrating up and down I-40.
What shared traits do you see between Amarillo and Knoxville? Having visited both, Amarillo is distinctly High Plains/Western while Knoxville is Appalachian. Different cultures, geography, everything.
Family goes to a non-denominational evangelical church in Knoxville, family goes to a non-denominational evangelical church in Amarillo. Both would probably be the same denomination but its unpopular to claim a denomination these days. After church its dinner that's a meat + 2 vegetables and cornbread. There's a big ford in each driveway that hasn't hauled more than dogs and kids since the day it came home. Maybe its just my biases but I just did not have any culture shock outside of how long it takes to drive anywhere out west.
> There's a big ford in each driveway that hasn't hauled more than dogs and kids since the day it came home
I can't speak on Knoxville because I've only spent a day there, but I've spent a good bit of time around Amarillo mostly from driving between CO and TX over a hundred times, although not really in the suburbs.
Saw a lot of beat up trucks that looked like they were owned by blue collar folks and used for truck things. But of course there's also plenty of brodozers, which I'm assuming are also fairly common in Knoxville.
Yeah, you're always gonna have those.
I was just saying two middle class families living a thousand miles away from each other along I-40 were fairly similar to me. They are also considered in the same nation according to this map.
The only part of this map I'd quibble with based on personal experience is Birmingham, AL (and Jefferson County) is definitely in that same Greater Appalachia nation because I can't in my heart of hearts say it and Dothan, AL have anything in common. The most interesting thing in Dothan is a hardware store.
As someone that grew up partly in Southern Illinois with lots of relatives in Southern Indiana I can tell you they have a great deal in common. Both regions are very "southern" culturally, with very distinct accents.
Illinois is an interesting place as it features large changes in culture from north to south. I was born in Northern Illinois and lived there until I was 10 when I moved 5 hours south. There is an enormous cultural difference. As the map shows Northern Illinois is part of the "Midlands" with a flat/generic accent whereas the Southern Illinois/Southern Indiana accent sounds a lot like Woody Harrelson's (who was born in Texas). The greater Chicagoland area is its own thing, the map shows it part of Yankeedom but I disagree - I lived in Chicago twice in my 20s and I've lived in Yankeedom (Massachusetts) for 25 years now and I don't see much similarity. I'd group far northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota in their own group, maybe called the "Opers"
About as accurate as grouping the entire west coast stretching from Alaska to SoCal as a monoculture.
It doesn't include SoCal. It stops in Monterey County/Big Sur.
Thinking about the map as monocultures is disingenuous. They have cultural focuses in common (among other things), which does not make them the same culture. Notably, these regions do not vote the same. It's not a party alignment map.
What "cultural focuses" are shared between the ranchers of the far west (e.g. the Bundy family), the Mormons of the high desert, a dozen indigenous nations speaking entirely different language families, and the gold rush immigrants of the Yukon?
> ranchers of the far west (e.g. the Bundy family), the Mormons of the high desert
Culturally, they both share a concern over Gun control for one. Those specific groups happen to align politically on the issue, which is incidental.
That's like 90% of rural America though. I've lived in various rural areas and they were invariably majority very pro gun, at least in the south and western USA. Northeast is more of a hodge podge on 2nd amendment though, and you have to go deeper into rural areas for stronger support.
And yet the Navajo Nation bordering both of them has fairly strict gun registries. Both of those are yet different than the situation in Alberta (more similar to TX), and YT more resembles Alaskan gun culture.
They're obviously not related by immigration group either. The Hopi descend from early first nations. The Navajo descend from the athabascan migrations. Yukon comes from Canadian and British gold rush populations. Alberta comes from various prairie settler efforts, including Ukrainian Canadians. The Mormons were their own settlement group in Mexico that went to war with many of the (now-) surrounding indigenous nations. Etc.
And this is just one "American nation". The same basic issue exists in all of them.
> And yet the Navajo Nation bordering both of them has fairly strict gun registries.
The fact there are political differences by region is not a defining factor, or the regions would look very different. The fact it is a cultural topic at all, looks to be one common factor. I feel like I'm talking in circles now.
Regardless, I really don't understand this sort of hair splitting. My imagination isn't that expansive, yet I can understand how these regions might have been determined in many cases. Asking the authors might get answers to these kinds of questions.
The Bundys are Mormons of the high desert. (OK, maybe not "high" entirely...)
The ubiquity of Subarus, the BLM signs in front yards & the pride stickers don't convince you? Ever drive an hour or two away from the coast and notice the difference?
I agree. However, I will say that I always thought that Southern Indiana and Southern Ohio were more similar than Southern Indiana and Northern Indiana.
King George’s royal proclamation of 1763 established the “Indian Reserve” covering most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. European colonists were prohibited from trespassing - only a small number of British military outposts were allowed. Just a short time before the revolution, it got organized as part of Quebec.
Early in the revolution, it was taken by the colonists who declared it “Illinois County, Virginia” and allowed people to stream in and claim their homesteads (Note that the northern part was claimed by Connecticut as their own “Western Reserve”). Essentially all of southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois was settled by people crossing the river from Kentucky, so it makes a lot of sense that you’d think that the southern parts of all these states seem more similar to each other than they are to their northern neighbors.
The next section north seems to have been mostly dominated by folks from the mid-Atlantic - Virginia, etc. And further north dominated by people that arrived on sailing ships, especially from New York. New Buffalo Michigan refers to Buffalo New York ;)
Anyway, it seems kind of weird that these states seem geographically oriented north-south but culturally oriented east-west. But the fact that they were depopulated (of Europeans) and then repopulated (by Europeans) gives an explanation of that, especially with the transportation available at the time of repopulation (of Europeans).
Hey now, at least the NFL agrees with them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFC_South
Scots-Irish migration.
There's obviously never going to be one right answer to any kind of spatial taxonomy of cultures, but if the methodology is thoughtful and makes you think about the shared or differing cultural properties, it can be interesting.
The Tri-State area (NY-NJ-Conn.) as New Netherland, I like it. It isn't NYS and it isn't south Jersey. I'd say create it tomorrow in a tri-state compact.
These are always kind of fun to contemplate - in part because everyone immediately jumps in with ways that they are wrong.
For instance where I live in Deschutes County, Oregon... physically, yeah, we are in that 'far west' region, but have a lot of cultural and economic ties to Oregon and even California west of the mountains.
Am I reading this correctly in that Chicago is the only section with dashes indicating a blend of regions?
Seems accurate but interesting this is the only area with crossover.
Yeah, this weirdly splits the Atlanta metro area in half between two regions based on the counties, and while north Atlanta and south Atlanta metro have decidedly differing cultures (along mostly but not entirely racial lines) the split is completely arbitrary on county lines with Fulton County, GA jutting upwards as if the 10 miles across that county don't represent anything on either side of it
Fulton County is a weird shape for historical reasons - it absorbed the counties to its north and south during the Depression - and historically the northern part of Fulton County (everything north of the Chattahoochee River) was Milton County. If Milton County still existed it would probably end up in Woodard's "Greater Appalachia" over "Deep South".
We can ignore current settlement patterns because Woodard does. In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...) he does explain the methodology, although I don't have access - but from the snippets I can see it appears that he's essentially trying to work out who the first European settlers in each area were. So it doesn't matter that north Fulton County is full of carpetbaggers from up North and immigrants. (I write this as I sit in an office in north Fulton County; I am a carpetbagger from up North and many of my co-workers are immigrants.)
It makes sense for the split to be along county lines just because a lot of data will be available at the county level, but it occasionally produces absurd results. I occasionally have mocked these splits as "I drive to Appalachia for ramen", because I used to live in DeKalb County about a mile from the DeKalb-Gwinnett county line - according to Woodard's map, DeKalb is "Deep South" and Gwinnett is "Appalachia" - and I liked a ramen place just over the county line. (Since then both I and the ramen place have moved.)
Maybe I misinterpreted what this is supposed to show. Is this based on data from like 150 years ago or is it based on how things are today?
This is similar to something I saw on reddit over the weekend which was a similar map but based on local cuisine. I live in North Fulton County now, but I'm originally from central Alabama and the dividing line for the cuisine was between "soul food" and whatever other term they had come up for deep fried food
Basically it was white people southern food vs. black people southern food (which, at the end of the day is actually not that different)
curious if this Appalachia vs. "Deep South" thing is really just a racial divide in the data with "Deep South" being African American descendants of slaves across the Black Belt and Appalachia being the more white population
Oh, I saw that map too.
The map in this post is historically based, I think, but they don't say that very loudly.
And definitely some of what we're seeing in this data is a racial divide - but the racial divide in the South goes back to where slave-based agriculture was and was not viable.
I'd imagine all the borders are fuzzy, but maybe that's the only spot where a broad enough area was that way to note it.
I live pretty much on the border between two regions on the map, and you can definitely see a difference just driving one county north or south. But of course you also see exceptions on both sides, in both individual homes or small towns that seem more suited for the other side of the border.
brb, showing Sureños a map that calls them El Norte
Got me with this one.
The red part of Canada should be "Loyalists" - british decendents + various elite / slave owners that moved north after American independance.
Very much not the same as US "midlands" in my opinion.
The criteria is dominant ancestry source. Loyalists generally came from the red area and dark green areas of the US, but that'd be confusing recursion if Canadian regions were defined as where in the US people came from vs US regions being defined by where in Europe they came from.
notable nitpick: calling DC a “federal entity” is mixing up the concepts of nation and state. (It’s also major erasure of the culture of people - mostly Black - who actually live there!)
The whole section around DC is..questionable. PG, Fairfax, and Loudoun counties are all in the Tidewater group that extends down to the NC triangle. Meanwhile Montgomery County, which is right over the Potomoc from Fairfax/Loudoun, is in a separate group that's shared with Philadelphia and Ohio? MoCo, Fairfax, and Loudoun are all incredibly similar both culturally and economically (i.e. wealthy DC suburbanites) and should either all be in the Tidewater category or in some separate "Capital Area" nation.
Federal entity should extend to the Rappahanock River
I'm not sure I'd extend it that far, but personally I could see at least to Woodbridge.
Another comment mentions this is based at least partially off original settlement/immigration patterns so I'm willing to be more leniant now, but at the very least inside the Beltway should be Federal entity/Capital area.
Anyone who thinks Austin is more culturally aligned with Indianapolis than San Antonio is a maniac.
I noticed that recent research showed that South Dakota has a high level of dark triad characteristics:
https://www.newsweek.com/psychology-psychopaths-dark-triad-m...
and my first though is "What's different about South Dakota and North Dakota" and got told by a friend who's a geography nerd that much of South Dakota is really weird and isolated and different from other states.
Same for Minneapolis, Boston, and Des Moines.
Agreed. What the western parts of this map avoids is that the cultures are a mix of mostly descendent European cultures (Norwegian, Irish, German, etc.) and Hispanic cultures especially in the south differs strongly once you go north of Colorado.
Interesting map, but it doesn't seem to be explained at all? (Except, I guess, in the book?)
Any cultural grouping that claims Humboldt and Tahoe aren't more closely related to each other than either are to the central valley is quite wrong. California pretty cleanly splits into 4 cultural regions: SoCal, The Bay, The Central Valley, and the Mountain Folk.
If you posterize enough to get to a map this course, then you'd have "The Left Coast" running down the Sierras, with parts of Klamath and Cascade Ranges (notably excepting the Shasta corner, which is more closely related to the Klan country side of Oregon). This can be somewhat justified, if one argues that the difference between the cultural ideas of the Bay Area are just urban versions of those that occupy the mountains (oddly harmonious mix of hippies and libertarians vs. the Bay's coexistence of corporate libertarians and progressives).
The fact that German and Scandinavian heavy Minnesota and Wisconsin are Yankeedom and much more culturally aligned with Massachusetts instead of much of the Dakotas rubs me the wrong way.
And the "Far West" is an absolute cop-out, and calling Central Texas culturally "central Appalachia" is completely ridiculous.
> "El Norte"
> All the way in the south
..north of mexico
SPAM ALERT! Colin Woodard's new book will be published in a few days (November 4, 2025). Be sure to buy a copy!8-))
Looks like one of these maps where people visit Toronto and paint the whole country as "visited".
On a population basis, though, not really - most Canadians live near the border, in one of the various regions that span the border on this map.
"There's a Canada outside of Toronto?" - Torontonians
(all in good jest)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_Stat...
This seems like a much saner breakdown of the US into mega-regions. Feels much more intuitive and doesn't involve wacky stuff like grouping Philadelphia; the Oklahoma panhandle; and Mooseknuckle, Ontario together.
Site down, from the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250922163253/https://colinwood...
This is silly. Louisiana and Quebec have so little in common.
Those left coast elites.
The “Far West” (terrible name) seems to be just a lazy grouping of most of the area west of the Mississippi. Definitely has a very costal biased view of the world.
Really weird to not list Deseret as its own thing honestly (all of Utah, Colorado west of the Divide, Idaho up to Rexburg, most of Nevada that isn't Tahoe/Reno/Vegas)
I've seen this called the "Mormon corridor" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_corridor) but Deseret is a catchier name. Sometimes that includes Vegas, though - Vegas is historically Mormon.
GOOD point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Las_Vegas_Mormon_Fort_Stat...
Yeah, but now it's hard to find anywhere less culturally Mormon than Vegas.
Same as it ever was. The "Empty Quarter"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer...
I'm reminded of the children's book Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport, the first half of which is some kid's stereotypes of what life is like "Out West" (including the title). Then his family completes the move "Out West", and finds that things are quite a bit different from how he expects.
Marrying a woman from Louisiana has been similarly instructive to me as regards "the South".
Whys PEI under new france lol, this map feels like engagement bait.
Look again, it's under Yankeedom. Anticosti and the Magdelenes are nearby and under New France.
Oh yea ur right.
It seems so. Greenland as First Nation is straight up chauvinism.
Greenland is mostly populated by Inuits
Precisely
«First Nations (French: Premières Nations) is a term used to identify Indigenous peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis.»
If you can make space for New Netherland, it doesn't make any sense to collapse all northern native cultures together, when they are just as or even more diverse than the US east cost.
Was just about to type this comment. Allegedly, the guy who came up with the term “First Nations” was from a group (Athabaskan? I don’t remember) who were historically at war with the Inuit, so he left them out. Pretty ridiculous. I’m pretty sure everyone involved would be annoyed at getting grouped together into the same “nation”.
I knew there was a reason I loved New Orleans. I love to go there and imagine what America could have been with French food, culture, and taste, instead of what actually happened. British food, no culture, no taste, Crocs and pajama pants at McDonald's.
There are, uh, plenty of crocs and pajama pants at the many New Orleans McDonald's locations.
I also don't think the US ended up absorbing much British cuisine, certainly native food(s) and immigrant waves have contributed much more than England.
Culinary traditions are far more recent than Europeans pretend they are. Anything with corn, potatoes or tomatoes is necessarily less than 500 years old.
Sounds like American culture is leaking back across the waves to France.