A view of a lighthouse at sunrise on Lake Michigan. Source: gettyimages.com

I love the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it, he outlines the regional cultures of America and the impact that each has had on the development of the United States. I think it’s fascinating, mostly because I’m a firm believer in the Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue.” History tells us so much about what could possibly happen in the future.

But I think Woodard got one thing wrong in his book. There should be 12 American nations, not 11. The Great Lakes should be its own regional culture. Furthermore, it should be recognized as the first purely American culture in American history.

Here are the eleven nations as identified by Woodard:

o Yankeedom (New England and the upper Midwest). Settled by English Puritans, they valued education and communal decision-making.

o New Netherland (the greater New York metropolitan area). Founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, this nation has maintained a multicultural and commercial perspective since being established.

o Midlands (stretching from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, widening as it moves westward). Established first by English Quakers and later the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s been a “go along to get along” kind of region for most of its existence.

o Tidewater (the Chesapeake Bay area). Founded by English who were perhaps most sympathetic to the British Crown, it’s where the plantation economy got its start.

o Greater Appalachia (starting in central Pennsylvania and West Virginia and extending southwestward into Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas). Settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were accustomed to difficult terrain, the region might be the most ruggedly individualist of them all.

o Deep South (the lowlands just south of the Appalachian Mountains). Tidewater might be where the plantation economy got its start, but the Deep South took it to another level. Probably the most hierarchical region as a result.

o New France (in the U.S., mostly southern Louisiana; in Canada, the most populated parts of Quebec). Not much of this is left in America today, but Cajun culture has left an indelible imprint on the nation.

o El Norte (the length of the U.S./Mexico border, extending into southern California). Founded by Spanish Catholic missionaries, once part of Mexico. An influx of settlers from the Deep South and Appalachian nations turned it into a unique transitional region.

o Far West (generally the area in the U.S. between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains). The settlers of the Deep South, Midlands and Yankeedom who wanted more land and just to be left alone moved here.

o The Left Coast (central California up through the Bay Area, beyond Portland and Seattle, and continuing into southeastern Alaska). Probably owes its northern orientation to being founded by New Englanders and the Midlands. But the influence of El Norte and Greater Appalachia is also felt.

o First Nations (the parts of Canada south of the Arctic Circle that include the northern portions of the Prairie Provinces, northern Ontario and northern Quebec). The First Nations influence is much stronger in Canada but can still be felt in the northern Great Lakes.

I should note that since the book’s initial publishing, Woodard added Spanish Caribbean (south Florida) and Greater Polynesia (Hawaii) in his description of American Nations, but for now I’m sticking with the original eleven.

Woodard’s telling of American history is one of alliances between the various American nations, as they try to create a working coalition that can rule the entire nation. It’s been years since I last read the book, but Woodard writes of two coalitions that have historically opposed each other – the northern-oriented Yankeedom/New Netherland/Left Coast coalition on one side, and the southern-oriented Deep South/Greater Appalachia/Tidewater coalition on the other. Woodard says that the remaining groups, the Midlands, New France, the Far West, and El Norte, follow either the dominant northern or southern coalition, depending on the social, political or cultural issue.

I can get with that framing in a broad sense, and I think it aptly describes America through about 1970-1980. But since then, there’s been LOTS of churn in America as people move across nations, and the numbers create shifts in the balance of power. In addition, some nations have “flipped” from one coalition to another (Tidewater), or portions of one nation isn’t as reliably with the rest of its coalition as it used to be (the Great Lakes portion of Yankeedom).

And here’s where I make the case for the elevation of the Great Lakes as a regional culture, and where I think Woodard erred. Woodard is correct in saying that the Midwestern portion of Yankeedom was in large part settled by New Englanders. However, I think he overstates the influence of Yankees in the Great Lakes, and understates the influence of people from the Midlands, who also settled there. Yes, there were settlements founded by people who grew up in New England, but there were settlements founded by people from southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, as well as numerous French holdovers from the region’s time as a French colonial holding.

To understand what I mean, it’s worth looking at another possible flaw in Woodard’s nations categories, identifying southern Ontario in Canada as part of the Midlands. Culturally, I see Ontario as being much more similar to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota than to Iowa or northern Missouri, and I think most Americans and Canadians on either side of the border would agree.

Going a little deeper into this, I see the Great Lakes (and Greater Appalachia too, which gets a mention as a separate nation) as the first post-Revolutionary War settlements in the new America, where people from the thirteen colonies intermingled and began the formation of distinctly American values and principles.

Unfortunately, I think the continued 19^th century westward movement of people until they reached the Pacific Ocean meant that the culture of the Great Lakes would forever be historically overlooked. It’s not an appendage of New England; it’s where the foundational American culture was formed.