ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SUGGESTED READING

American Nations is largely a work of synthesis and, as such, has many intellectual forebears, informants, and godparents. A few works were especially helpful to me in thinking about North America’s regional cultures, and I recommend them heartily for those wishing to further explore their development, expansion, and characteristics.

Joel Garreau first advanced the notion that North America was defined by international rivalries in The Nine Nations of North America, which appeared in 1981 and came into my hands as a junior high school student shortly thereafter. As I mentioned at the outset, Garreau’s argument was ahistorical, and so, to my thinking, couldn’t quite hit the nail on the head. However, his overall point—that the continent’s real, meaningful fissures did not correspond to official political boundaries—was spot-on and helped inspire my own inquiry nearly three decades later.

Some of my favorite works on regionalism are also among the most accessible to the general reader. David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989) posits that four “British folkways” were transposed to British North America in the colonial period that roughly correspond to Yankeedom, the Midlands, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia. Fischer’s focus is on demonstrating continuities between specific regional cultures in the British Isles and their North American splinters, a thesis that’s taken some knocks from other academics. I think his most important contribution is to have substantiated the presence, origins, and salient characteristics of distinct regional cultures on this side of the pond. One of Fischer’s more recent works, Champlain’s Dream (2008), did much the same for New France. Russell Shorto’s excellent Island at the Center of the World (2004) brought the Dutch period of New York’s history alive and argued for its lasting impact on the culture of the Big Apple—a thesis I heartily endorse. Kevin Phillips’s prophetic 1969 study The Emerging Republican Majority identified many of the key fault lines between regional cultures and used them to predict four decades of American political developments; two of his later works—The Cousins’ Wars (1999) and American Theocracy (2006)—draw on regional differences in exploring Anglo-American relations and the decline of American power respectively. In Made in Texas (2004), a scathing attack on the Dixification of American politics, Michael Lind identifies regional tensions between what I would call the Appalachian and Deep Southern sections of his home state, and some of their salient policy differences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Among the more technical scholarly works, a few stand out. Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Cultural Geography of the United States (1973) developed useful concepts for mapping and analyzing regional cultures. Raymond Gastil’s Cultural Regions of the United States (1975) fleshed out regional variations in a variety of subjects and social indicators. Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (1969) by Donald W. Meinig used similar approaches to examine the oft-discussed cultural fissures in Texas. Frederick Merk’s History of the Westward Movement (1978) and Henry Glassie’s Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968) are invaluable in tracing settlement flows.

Another set of works shed light on important aspects of particular nations. E. Digby Baltzell—scholar of the American elite—compared and contrasted the cultures of the leading families of the intellectual capitals of Yankeedom and the Midlands in his exhaustive 1979 study, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. For understanding El Norte’s Spanish heritage, David J. Weber’s Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) and The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (1982) provide essential background. Rhys Issac’s The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (1982) describes the Tidewater gentry’s world at its apogee in wonderful detail. For New Netherland in the Dutch era, I recommend Oliver A. Rink’s 1986 study Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York. On the Deep South and the Barbadian system on which it was first modeled, turn to Richard S. Dunn’s 1972 study Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 and his April 1971 paper “English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina” in the South Carolina Historical Magazine. The classic—and very chilling—academic examination of Deep Southern culture in the early twentieth century is Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Case and Class, published by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago in 1941. On the spread of the nations into the Midwest and the implications thereof see especially Richard Power, Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of The Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest (1953); Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (1970); and Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (1996). For the Far West and Left Coast, start with Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (1986), David Alan Johnson’s Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840–1890 (1992), and Kevin Starr’s, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (1973). My thanks to all of these authors—and to many others whose works appear in the endnotes—for creating so many fine ingredients.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Sarah Skillin Woodard, who shared in this project’s many stresses while in graduate school and, much of the time, pregnant. As fate would have it, American Nations and our first child wound up being due at the same time, and Sarah continued editing the manuscript and offering me active support and assistance at a time when these roles should have been reversed. Thank you, my love; you know this would never have been finished without your many contributions and sacrifices. Our son, Henry, who ultimately beat this book into the world, has been a joy and inspiration, even if his editorial advice is sometimes difficult to interpret.

My friend and journalistic colleague Samuel Loewenberg—who splits his time between Berlin, Geneva, and the relief camps of Africa—took the time to read sections of American Nations and offered invaluable advice at a time when it was needed; thanks much, Sam, I owe you yet another one. My agent, Jill Grinberg, not only continued to provide me with stellar representation, but at a critical juncture, provided assistance that went far beyond the call of duty; no author could ask for a better person in his corner. At Viking, I am grateful to my editor, Rick Kot, for his support and sound advice on both this book and The Lobster Coast. Thanks also to designers Paul Buckley at Viking and Oliver Munday in Washington, D.C. (for the cover); to Viking’s Francesca Belanger (for designing the book itself); to Sean Wilkinson of Portland, Maine (for creating the maps and patiently revising them); and to copy editor Cathy Dexter (wherever you are).

And thanks to you, the reader, for taking this journey with me. If you enjoyed the trip, do tell your friends.

April 2011
Portland, Maine