The American Nations Regions Across North America

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.)

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.

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).

But southern Indiana is very different. Definitely more similar to Kentucky & Cincinatti-area southern Ohio. You start to get "twangs" of Southern Americana as you approach the Ohio River Valley, which are basically non-existent in northern Indiana. Something about the air is different.

The biggest cultural shock people not from the midwest, and even people from the midwest, often experience about the area is IME northern mainland/non-UP Michigan. Its a truly unique region that is dissimilar to almost anywhere else I've visited; like mixing the cultures of the New England coast with rural farms.

But IMO that's a very far cry from eastern/south-eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western NC, WV, etc; truly core Appalachia.

Its also a far cry from mid-Indiana, which is culturally identical to northern Indiana, most of Illinois, Iowa, southern Michigan, maybe even as far as southern Wisconsin, Kansas, and Nebraska. That's Corn/Rust belt, very crop-farm oriented, dairy farms, extremely flat, but not as rural as many people think, not nearly as rural as Appalachia or the west.

> 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.