One of my pandemic silver linings has been re-establishing a regular reading habit. I plan on recapping my reading in these short overviews, with quick summary information and quotes for anyone looking for their next book.

Published: 2011

Read: March 2021

Publisher Summary: According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future.

Genre: History

Rating: 9.5/10

Eric’s Two Cents:
Full disclosure point #1: I didn’t personally verify the historical record Woodard posits in his book; he does, however, provide a full bibliography if one were so inclined.
Full disclosure point #2: I personally find Woodard’s re-telling of America’s fractured history to be extremely compelling and, more often than not, I’m inclined to believe him.
This book is a must-read for any American, if only to better understand our shared history together on the continent, and the recommendation applies doubly to those looking for a more substantive answer to the simplistic Red-Blue/Rural-Urban divide question(s) we’re increasingly faced with. Published more than a decade ago, this book explains what’s happening today with more relevance than anything you’ll see on the front page of the news today. Seriously, read some of the quotes below and try to tell me you’re not intrigued. The less we explore our past, the harder it is to move into the future.

Who Should Read This?

• American History students
• Political operatives playing the long game
• People who “just can’t understand why those idiot Democrats/Republicans think ________”

Skimmable? I wish this book went on forever; may just need to check out Woodard’s source list to dig deeper.

Notable Quotables:

• One might ask how such a tyrannical society could have produced some of the greatest champions of republicanism, such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison. The answer is that Tidewater’s gentry embraced classical republicanism, meaning a republic modeled after those of ancient Greece and Rome. They emulated the learned, slave-holding elite of ancient Athens, basing their enlightened political philosophies around the ancient Latin concept of libertas, or liberty. This was a fundamentally different notion from the Germanic concept of Freiheit, or freedom, which informed the political thought of Yankeedom and the Midlands. Understanding the distinction is essential to comprehending the fundamental disagreements that still plague relations between Tidewater, the Deep South, and New Spain and have on one hand and Yankeedom and the Midlands on the other.
  For the Norse, Anglo Saxons, Dutch, and other Germanic tribes of Northern Europe, “freedom” was a birthright of free peoples, which they considered themselves to be.  Individuals might have differences in status and wealth, but all were literally “born free.” All were equal before the law, and all had come into the world possessing “rights” that had to be mutually respected on threat of banishment.
• Yankees would come to have faith in government to a degree incomprehensible to people of the other American nations. Government, New Englanders believed from the beginning, could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools. And more than any other group in America, Yankees conceive of government as being run by and for themselves.  Everyone is supposed to participate, and there is no greater outrage than to manipulate the political process for private gain.  Yankee idealism never died.
• Like the nouveaux riches everywhere, they were fixated on acquiring appropriate status symbols and following the latest fashions and customs of English gentry with the dedication that startled visitors. “Their whole lives are on one continued race,” one resident wrote, “in which everyone is endeavoring to distance all behind them and to overtake and pass by all before him.”
• Appalachian people everywhere distrusted political parties, seeing them as cartels of powerful interests, and voted for whichever one appeared to advocate for ordinary individuals.  For Appalachian Midwesterners it was the meddlesome Yankees who represented the greatest threat to their ideas of individual freedom.  As a result, Borderlanders-dominated regions solidly supported the Deep Southern-led democratic party throughout the 19^th century and right up into the civil rights era.
• “The great God of Nature has placed us in different situations,” Cherokee elder Corn Tassel told negotiators at a Revolutionary era peace conference. “It is true he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people.”
• As the Deep South spread, it developed a social and political philosophy that went beyond defending slavery to actually celebrating it.  What others regarded as an authoritarian society built on an immoral institution that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, Deep Southern oligarchs viewed as the pinnacle of human achievement.  Theirs was a democracy modeled on the slave states of ancient Greece and Rome, whose elites had been free to pursue the finer things in life after delegating all drudgery to slaves and a disenfranchised underclass.  The Southern gentry were superior to northerners because they had a “nobility to cultivate some of the higher and more ennobling traits of humanity,” according to one Deep Southern political boss.  Yankees, this boss added, were “a nation of shopkeepers” while Deep Southerners were a “race of statesmen, orators, military leaders and gentlemen equal and probably superior to any now existing on this or any other continent.” They were also spared the “ignorance, bigotry, and envy resulting from an oppressed and starving laboring class” by the presence of slaves.
• Despite the scale of immigration, newcomers were always a small minority.  The proportion of foreign born remained at about 10% of the U.S. population throughout the period, peaking at 14% in 1914.  Its cumulative effect was important but not overwhelming.  Even after adding together all immigrants between 1790 and 2000 – 66 million altogether – and their descendants, demographers have calculated that immigration accounts for only about half the early 21^st century population of the United States.  In other words, if the United States had sealed its borders and 1790, in the year 2000 it would still have had a population of about 125 million instead of 250 million. The 1820-1924 immigration was enormous, but it was never truly overpowering.
• The occupiers banned leading Confederates from public office and the voting booth, allowed outside business interests to seize control of important segments of the regional economy, and rewrote the laws to reflect their own values.  The northern forces were confident that the region’s people would quickly embrace their institutions, values, and political structures once their blood thirsty leaders were deposed.  They setup racially integrated, New England style school systems, imported Yankee school teachers to run them, and imposed local taxes to pay for them. They “freed” an oppressed people – the region’s enslaved blacks – but failed to provide the security or economic environment in which they might thrive. They assumed their natural allies in one region – the Unionist minded strongholds of Appalachia – would support their effort to remake the zone of occupation in an essentially Yankee image. But despite the backing of military units, the control of broad sectors of government, education, and the economy, and a massive civilian outreach program, not only to the occupation fail to achieve most of its goals, it unified the three southern nations against them to a degree never before seen.
• While it forced key social changes, the Second Reconstruction did not alter the Dixie bloc’s Private Protestant values.  Many whites in Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Deep South became further entrenched in a Southern evangelical worldview that resisted social reform or the lifting of cultural taboos, and increasingly sought to break down the walls between church and state so as to impose their values and moral code on everyone else.  This counterattack was quiet at first, as Southern evangelicals and fundamentalists concentrated on building the institutional machinery necessary to take on their northern opponents on the national stage.
• After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the nations banded together to a degree never before or since.  Borderlanders fought for the traditional Scots-Irish reason: to avenge an attack by defeating their enemies on the field of battle.  The tidewater and deep southern elite – still very much in charge of their nations – wished to uphold U.S. “national” honor and to defend their Anglo-Norman brethren across the sea.  Pacifist Midlanders backed the war as a struggle against military despotism, while Yankees, New Netherlanders, and Left Coasters emphasized the anti-authoritarian aspect of the struggle.  Residents of El Norte and the Far West embraced a war that showered their long neglected regions with Federal largesse.
• But one thing is certain: if Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union.  It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law.  We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over on their ideas.  The union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny.  Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near universal consensus on many fundamental political issues.  The United States needs its central government a function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it’s one of the few things binding us together.