You also seem to be misunderstanding the label “the 11 nations of North America.” This is not a political map of the sovereign territory of the United States.
What a bunch of nonsense. I wonder how many actual humans in each region the author ever met. I know from experience that very, very few places are as homogeneous as this map implies. The school I work at has about 600 students from 25 different national heritages. Some families have been here for more than 200 years, and others just got here a few months ago. Very different cultures and worldviews.
I don’t know what has changed in 25 years, but Naples, FL was nothing like Miami when I lived there, yet they are lumped in the same region. I can only think this was based on ignorance and imagination.
The scene of my wasted youth: suburban Los Angeles. The culture: Lawrence Welk on TV, Wolfman Jack on the radio, Korla Pandit at the roller rink, and monstrous movies at the drive-in. Surfers, skateboarders, hodads. Black, White, Latino hot-rodders. Southerners, Northerners, Dust Bowlers. Every July 4th, the All States’ Picnic, where relative newbies gathered with fellow refugees to bitch about smog and Californians while their kids hula-hooped. We could map dozens of “nations” around that one event.
I’ve visited many of those home “nations” since. Lately, except their cores and varied vegetation, they’re hard to distinguish from the road. Suburban strip-malls, franchise retailers and eateries, housing tracts, homeless camps. The same logos on trucks filling the highways. The same awful radio.
IMHO the problems with any cultural map-drawing are 1) multiculturalism, hundreds of societies intertwining, and 2) homogenization, culture flattened by communications - broadcast networks and interstate highways especially. Pancaked complexity FTW!
And we’re all separated into alternate universes by a common language. :smack:
Well, the OP has entitled this thread “The US really has 11 separate ‘nations’ and included all of Canada and parts of Mexico in it.
Because the OP is only interested in the parts of the map in the United States, and all 11 of the nations are represented in it.
From this you think the OP is claiming parts of Canada and Mexico are actually part of the United States? You’re smarter than that.
Not the First Nation, which is entirely in Canada on the map.
Again, this leads you to think that the map or the OP claims that Canada and Mexico are part of the United States? It’s obviously not the case.
The OP says that there are 11 nations in the US, linking to a map that shows one of the 11 nations is the First Nation, located in Canada.
And as presented in the linked article (haven’t read the actual book didn’t even know it existed) the original Nine Nations (which I do have in my small library, it’s fun to read from time to time) is a much better more well thought out, possibly even researched? book.
The map doesn’t show Alaska. But if you read the parenthetical remark under “First Nation” it says that much of Alaska is part of that nation.
The region of the Dakota’s, Wyoming, eastern Montana etc. would also be the ‘nation of the Horse Culture natives’ where that culture dominated down to the present…if the European settlers had not displaced and dominated those people. I don’t think it’s ‘unfair exclusion’ to now classify no whole region of the US as dominated by native culture. No whole region is, because the European settlers supplanted that culture.
Somewhat likewise for African Americans. Segregation, legal and practical, meant and to an arguable degree still means that African American culture (however it might be defined) dominates in enclaves. But not in any whole region. The whole region with highest % African American population is the Deep South, or more concentrated still in the so called Black Belt region around the Mississippi (originally because of the soil, though the term can have a double meaning). But the dominant culture there was that of the whites, who remained dominant until recently (if one even accepts that things have changed a lot recently). Saying that the way things get done in the state of MS differently than MI or MT is handed down from an African American cultural history in MS is clearly inaccurate IMO.
I think you can legitimately criticize the regional ‘cultural nation’ concept of that article as being a very incomplete description of cultural geography, because it ignores enclaves, and the sum of the effect of a bunch of enclaves, as in for example the noticeable effect of African American cultural contributions on general US culture, which isn’t new. However not naming a large geographic ‘African American cultural nation’ isn’t unfair exclusion. There is no such whole region, due to past unfair exclusion.
It does, however, expose a fundamental flaw in the concept behind the whole book, one that effectively renders the idea of “11 nations” meaningless.
I’ve known towns where they ask which church you go to, for similar reasons.
I vaguely remember an old article discussing how ad agencies divide the population according to what products they are likely to buy and what ad/sales approaches were most likely to work. These were not geographic divisions, exactly, although each sort of person was more likely to live different places.
I think one division was called rifles and pickups. I’m pretty sure the ad guys expected the groups to be fluid.
What?
Interesting map. I wonder what the Canadians think of being subsumed into several of the US “nations”???
I can see the argument for varying cultures in different parts of the country, but at a minimum, some of the lines aren’t quite right. I live in a DC suburb, in Virginia, and per the map we’re part of the “tidewater” area. Culturally we’re VERY different from anything more than about 50 miles south of us, much more like Maryland up through New Jersey. I hate when a computerized form asks a region and I have to put “south” because really, no DC suburb is truly “south”. I’d argue that everything north of us in Maryland etc. would be part of Yankeedom vs Midlands - up to about halfway through New Jersey, and the eastern edge of Pennsylvania.
Reading a bit more of the article, it seems to focus on who originally settled the areas, NOT their current culture.
“New France” is “a pocket of liberalism nestled in the Deep South”. Admittedly I’ve never spent time down there, but liberalism is NOT something I think of in coastal Louisiana etc. Yes, it may have a lot of French influence, but again, the map doesn’t take into account how opinions have evolved over the years.
The idea that Canadians in, say, Southern Ontario are part of a nation with western Oklahoma, but not upstate New York or Michigan, is preposterous, and makes me wonder how seriously this is meant to be taken.
The heading reads “This map shows how the US really has 11 separate ‘nations’ with entirely different cultures”.
Last I heard, the US did not encompass all of North America.
In 1989, David Hackett Fischer published the classic Albion’s seed, that very impressively and most academically soundly established that four separate waves of immigration from the British Isles created four distinct cultural “nations” within this country- each coming over at a different period in ENglish history, under different political and religious contexts, and created cultures that live on to this very day, despite generations of immigration and change. Puritan New England; (Yankeedom), the Cavaliers of the Chesapeake Bay region (little issue there between royalists and Cromwell), Delaware Valley Quakers, and then them damn borderlands Scott-Irish-English who had known nothing but continuous warfare for hundreds of years, who brought a clan based warrior culture and took it (and my progenitors) up into the mountains and became hillbillies with an attitude.
See: Wikipedia:
The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book:
East Anglia and the Netherlands to Massachusetts
The Exodus of the English Puritans (Pilgrims and Puritans influenced the Northeastern United States’ corporate and educational culture)[4]
The South of England to Virginia
The Cavaliers and Indentured Servants (Gentry influenced the Southern United States’ plantation culture)[5]
North Midlands to the Delaware Valley
The Friends’ Migration (Quakers influenced the Middle Atlantic and Midwestern United States’ industrial culture)[6]
Borderlands to the Backcountry
The Flight from North Britain (Scotch-Irish and border English influenced the Western United States’ ranch culture and the Southern United States’ common agrarian culture)
American Nations is an update, Colin Woodward, 2012, I think- he identifies 11 separate cultural groups in the current national mindset. This is a real effect.
I stumbled across Albion’s seed, found it so explanatory of my backwoods upbringing (Think Hillbilly Elegy, but academic style) that I moved on to American Nations, reading as we speak.
I have read a whole lot of liberal/progressive despisement of those unsavory types that voted from the orange banana slug. Let me explain something to you about warrior culture. Not losing is all- against common sense, even losing life itself. I mean, think William Wallace. Bind that mindset with the deep south and some of these other cultures that do NOT reflect the community mindset of Yankeedom (New England and Upper California, and you begin to see how such a travesty could come to be. I was going to finish the book to bring it up, but I was beat to the (well, the map) punch. I have learned more about the politics of the United States in these two texts than almost everything else I have ever studied, combined. Example: The Dutch in what was to become new york sold the first African slaves. Slavery in the deep south was at first much milder in form that what it became, as culture and practices from Barbados and the rest of the British West Indies came to the US. Oh, and the oldest “nation” is El Norte- the Spanish of New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Baha- they see themselves as very distinct and different than Mexicans. These are 4-500 page, heavily annotated texts- I can’t possibly do them justice.
But if you find yourself adrift in trying to grasp the political reality of the current blue state red state divide, I will guarantee you these texts will make some of it, if not make sense, at least show you the dividing lines in a way more superficial analysis cannot. Worth the time if you have it and you seriously want to understand.
I don’t entirely agree. Like I said, defining ‘cultural nations’ as contiguous geographic regions is a quite limited description of cultural geography IMO. However it’s not meaningless. Who mainly settled and dominated various areas of the US* is important to the dominant local culture in many cases. Again I believe it’s a meaningful not meaningless insight that what’s so different about NY is partly an echo of New Netherlands, though it’s also that NY is so much more Jewish than the rest of the US, etc. It’s a number of things, but the Dutch are part of it. Likewise there’s no denying that original predominantly Scots-Irish settlement of Appalachia is part of what makes it distinct, true of the white South in general to some degree. More to it than original settlers of the region yes, meaningless no.
And in terms of those ‘who settled’ effects, it’s not ‘racist’ to not have Native or African American regions as was the complaint as I read it. That’s just historical reality. The Europeans dominated, not them.
*let’s leave out ‘nations’ which cross the border with Canada or Mexico which introduces another big diluting factor, that places are part of different (actual) countries. Although I don’t think the observation of the cultural similarity of ‘mainstream’ American upper Midwesterners and people from some parts of Canada is ‘meaningless’, it’s kind of obvious actually. It’s just even less of the whole picture once you’re talking of people in actually different countries.
Both of these statements are true:
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This map depicts the 11 nations of North America (the United States, Mexico, and Canada)
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This map depicts the 11 nations of the United States (which constitutes a portion of North America)
Neither of these statements, taken together or separately, requires one to believe that Canada and Mexico have surrendered their sovereignty to the United States or that the United States encompasses all of North America.