The US really has 11 separate ‘nations’ with entirely different cultures
It seems pretty well thought out. I do agree with a lot of this.
Thoughts??
Like all clever attempts to categorize people it contains some general truths but takes them too far and becomes another form of astrology-like pseudoscience.
I don’t deny there’s a certain amount of “truthiness” to it, but it’s grossly oversimplified. Depending on what point your want to make you can divide any group of people into as few as two groups (me/not me) or as many as you want.
Does geographic location matter more or less than education and income? Is a third-generation Asian American more comfortable with a first-generation Asian immigrant, or a third-generation white American? Does a liberal, mainline Christian have more in common with a liberal atheist, or a conservative Evangelical? It all depends on which way you want to slice the pie.
Methinks as demonstrable bunkum as any garden variety horoscope, but my question to the OP is why do you find the idea attractive?
Exactly. An interesting article. I don’t agree with it all.
And to answer the post just before this, well, I don’t agree with it all.
I ALSO don’t agree with the sickeningly virulent enraged demands made by an awful lot of people in the U.S.A. that this is a Monolithic Christian Nation No Matter What.
In my town (Melbourne), the traditional question was “What school did you go to?”. Because the answer to that enable us to slot you into your culture and tribe. You can slot people into bigger or smaller groups: it’s a natural human characteristic. But for most of us, two groups is enough, and much less effort.
My tribe. And everybody else.
When my brother was back living in the 'states for a couple of years, he noticed that he was a Northerner. People from the South were different, and he noticed that visiting the South made him feel foreign and alien. The rest of the differences? Well, everybody is different.
Woodward’s 2011 book is an [del]outright steal[/del] updating of the classic 1981 The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau. The boundaries are slightly different but they’re basically so obvious that you can’t do much to play around with them.
That Woodard’s book came out 30 years later and couldn’t show deep structural changes says a lot. I do wonder, though, whether that will be true in 2041.
Is this an Australian thing? I used to have a co-worker who once claimed there were only 2 US accents - Northern and Southern. It was quite odd, since there are often more than 2 distinct accents in a given state.
At any rate, yes, there are regional differences. That’s hardly a US thing though. Try China, where it was (is?) common for even the spoken language to be almost mutually unintelligible from town to town. Or Germany. Or Italy. Or France. Or Switzerland.
As many differences as there may be regionally, two Americans taken at random are more likely to share many more cultural aspects with each other than somebody from another country, even places like Canada or the UK.
Indeed and with the supplementary “who do you barrack for” even more exquisitely precise.
I’ve seen this, and rather resented the notion that proximity to Mexico is the primary distinguishing characteristic of Southern California. But hey, you know, that’s Business Insider, the same people who claimed that UCLA is the most dangerous college campus in the entire country.
Politically, there’s not much reason to separate the southern coastal counties from the Left Coast. Even the OC and San Diego County went for Clinton in 2016.
What’s the DC/Northern Virginia area?
And Hawaii?
And I do question some of the differences. Especially the lumping of the Louisiana coast with Quebec. Do those areas really have more in common with each other than with their immediate neighbors? They obviously did a couple centuries ago, but I think they’ve gone their separate ways since.
One change that’s I think has happened since the earlier book, but is not in the update: the Denver area seems to be more in tune with the west coast than with its surrounding area, so it probably should be considered an outlying island of the Left Coast.
I’ve seen zillions of such divvy-up-the-US maps, dissecting the union by foods, soft and hard drinks, clothes, sports, psychology, entertainments, education, vehicles, and more than I recall at the moment. From CityLab/Maps recently comes The Three Personalities of America, Mapped defining regional clusters called 1) Friendly & Conventional, 2) Relaxed & Creative, and 3) Temperamental & Uninhibited, and showing where those personality traits are weak or strong. I guess we’re all free to plot our own diced’n’sliced’n’spliced maps. Who knows, maybe we can start secessionist movements.
And as usual, we need a movement called Black Lives Matter for even stuff like this.
This seems pretty arbitrary. “Tidewater” for Virginia and the Carolinas is more descriptive of a particular accent than anything distinguishing them, from say, Georgia. The upper midwest isn’t “Yankeedom” and has little in common with proper Yankees (New England, maybe some large cities in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois). Also, minor artistic quibble, Miami is more than “part of Spanish Caribbean”, it is in fact the capital of South America.
Also, Americans reading this map should be aware that, owing to historical quirks of international law, British Columbia is not a US state, Quebec belongs to neither the US nor Old France, and Mexico is in fact an independent country.
What a weird map. The narrow strip along the west coast is really odd.
It’s the larger urban areas on the western part of the country that differ from the more rural areas. So it should be a set of islands (and include Las Vegas, etc.) than a strip of land.
And the Deep South/Greater Appalachia thing is ridiculous. It slices thru the Atlanta metro region. And in that area the divides are: Atlanta proper, the ring suburbs and the ex-urbs. It’s not a line, it’s a series of rings. And most of the large cities in the region are like this.
This was done totally capriciously.
Personally I enjoy these thought experiments because I am interested in ideas of how to improve the quality of political representation in America. Maybe it would be good to organize states with similar cultural values, or maybe it would be good to organize around conflict-prone resources like rivers, or maybe the best we can do is redraw states more equally proportioned to their populations. Anything would be better than what we’ve done, which was driven by the forces of land grabs and slavery preservation.
I do think there is a distinctive Tidewater culture, but I don’t see it here in Richmond. In Williamsburg and Gloucester County, yes. But not in the metro Richmond area. However, I wouldn’t put us in Greater Appalachia either. Nor the Deep South. So Tidewater is the best one of the available options, IMHO.
I’m from Georgia. My accents marks me as “not from around here” mainly because I do the stretching of vowels thing (“hill” is pronounced as “heeell”). You hear folks in Southwest Virginia doing this, but not elsewhere in the state. Also, folks around here call their mothers “Mumma” and their fathers “Diddy”. Folk in Georgia say “Momma” and “Daddy”. When I hear someone say “Diddy”, I’m reminded that I’m a stranger in a strange land.
So I agree that Virginia is culturally different from Georgia, at least. It’s not just speech patterns, but also food. Their BBQ is mustardy and yellow. And they use cole slaw as a sandwich fixing. No. Just no.