Here's Where It Gets Interesting - An America Divided by Region with Colin Woodard

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Joining Sharon today is Colin Woodard, the director of the Nationhood Lab. Colin is an expert on the regional cultures that make up the United States, and while we tend to think of regional differences as disagreements about our political views, the cultural history goes much deeper than that. Colin has studied how these geographical regional divides pertain to gun violence in America, and his conclusions may surprise you. Special thanks to our guest, Colin Woodard, for joining us today. Learn more about the Nationhood Lab through the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Colin Woodard Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So excited to have you joining me today because this conversation is whoa. I am chatting today with Colin Woodard, who is the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University. And we are going to have a very, very fascinating conversation about the cultural regions of the United States and how that relates to topics like gun violence today. You are not going to want to miss this one. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be chatting with Colin Woodard today. Thank you so much for being here.

I have a lot of questions, so thanks for agreeing to do this. I look forward to it. One of the things that I have found really interesting about your work is about sort of the geographical history of the United States, which is in and of itself, even if you didn't extrapolate any modern topics about it, would still be really interesting. But I've been reading with great interest some of your more recent work about the geographical differences related to gun violence in the United States. And I know that people who are listening to this care a lot about gun violence. They care a lot about protecting their rights, but they also care a lot about making sure the children are safe in school and things of that nature. One of the

great American questions is how do you balance the rights of the individual versus the rights of the society as a whole? But I would love to start, Colin, with a discussion about American nations, a history of the 11 rival regional cultures of North America. Let's start with talking about what the 11 rival regional cultures of the United States even are. What does that even mean, Colin? Well, the essential argument is to understand our country and its history and its current political cleavages, its past political cleavages, the differences between red states and blue states. It's essential to understand that we were founded originally as separate countries. And by countries, I mean the rival colonial projects that took foot

on the eastern and southwestern rims of what's now the United States. The Puritans in New England, the Scots-Irish going into the backcountry of the upland south and eventually down the Ohio River Valley, the Spanish moving south to north into the southwest, the Dutch settled area around New York City, the English West Indies slave lords needing to expand from Barbados and moving into Charleston and spreading over the lowland south, and so on. but even within the English world, different religious and ethnographic and political characteristics, different ideas about what kind of society they were creating, about what the good life is, about all the aspects of what we think of as culture. And they were rivals, even enemies, throughout the colonial period. I mean, they were on opposite sides of the English civil—the English colonies were on the opposite side of the English Civil War of the 1640s and had different ideas about their glorious revolution in 1689 and ended up

on opposite sides of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and of course, the Civil War. I mean, these were places that did not expect to wind up in a continent-spanning federation together. So, you know, with that backdrop, understanding our country as a balkanized federation explains a great deal. And the differences in the regions, I mean, I think people realize there are big regional differences, you know, the South and the North, in quotes, don't agree. But the actual boundaries, you know, they're tied to settlement streams. Each of these different colonial projects, they and their descendants settled through the 1840s, mutually exclusive strips of this continent, together colonizing, you know, sort of two-thirds of what's now the continental United States before the 1840s, which is when significant migration from not these groups

started coming into the country. And those colonial projects didn't follow state boundaries. So you can't use the classic Census Bureau divisions because they're ahistorical, make no sense, and don't capture the differences between the regional cultures. I would love to, if you don't mind, go through these different regions of the United States, these different historic regions, and people can read your book if they want even more detail on this. They can read American Nations because it's absolutely fascinating. But I want to give people just a really high level overview about what these unique regions even are. So let's start with New

Netherland, which is, you know, like the tiniest region. Yep, physically tiniest, but pretty big in population, surprisingly. Tell us about sort of the historic origins of New Netherland. So New Netherland today encompasses essentially the area around greater New York City. So the five boroughs, the western half of Long Island, the lower counties of the Hudson Valley like Westchester and Orange, and northern New Jersey, but not southern New Jersey. And that's the area that was the Dutch colonial project. In the mid-1600s of the Dutch, at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, center of capitalism, global trade, global trading companies, freedom of speech and inquiry, center of publishing and finance and all kinds of innovations in a otherwise almost medieval

circumstance. They founded a little village at the end of Manhattan Island that had all the characteristics of golden age Amsterdam when it was founded. The Dutch were never a majority. There were people from all over the world, many religions, all engaged in a commercial global city state. And it's a very different model than anywhere else on the continent. And New York City and its area have always been different in its global orientation and those different characteristics. And so you fast forward to today and the Dutch are long gone, but it is very much and very visibly a society modeled on that set of values, which accounts for a lot of its distinctiveness. Totally. I think what Americans think of, you know, sort of the colonial period,

we tend to think of Puritans and we tend to think of Southern planters, right? We think of Yankeedom and the Tidewater. Yeah, and no accident. Who wrote the first drafts of history? Absolutely. They didn't necessarily, weren't interested in including all the information about New Netherland. But I would love to just sort of expand and talk a little bit about where did these names come from? Did you invent these names? I had to coin names for each region. And in some cases, it was relatively easy. I mean, New Netherland is what the Dutch called their colony. So that was easy. Or New France in the case of the French Imperial Project. Deep South is pretty obvious. You know, Midlands is kind of obvious. Yankeedom, it's a greater New England cultural space in the

sense that New Englanders and their descendants first colonized it. And we're talking the upstate of New York, of course, New England itself, but the Western Reserve of Ohio, which was the area claimed by Connecticut as its Western Reserve and was settled by Connecticuters, and the upper Great Lakes states, essentially. The Yankee title is a title actually given by the Dutch to the New Englanders when they looked across the river and thought that they were lacking. You know, it's got Jan Kass, you know, kind of means cheesehead. You know, it was a derogatory term, and the New Englanders kept it. But that Yankee term is really, I mean, it's really talking about

greater New England space more than anything else. You know, far west is geographical in sense, El Norte for the Spanish Southwest. In Mexico, you would call the northern provinces today, all the California, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and so on, they would call it in Mexico City, the North, El Norte. But back before the US annexations, Tejas and upper California and what's now New Mexico and the rest would have also been part of the North. So El Norte kind of fits for it as a region. Some people might be interested to learn that Yankeedom includes the Great Lakes states, at least portions of the Upper Great Lakes states, not necessarily the entire Great Lakes, like not all of Illinois, for example. But it

also includes, you know, all the way heading over into big chunks of New York and Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, et cetera. What were some of the historic qualities of Yankee-dom and how do we still see that today? So Yankee-dom originally is settled by the early Puritans that everyone remembers, right? And they were a people who, distinct among all the colonial projects, believed that they were in a covenant with God to do what they were doing. They were like the Hebrews in the Old Testament, and God had chosen them as his chosen people to go do specific things, which involved an errand in the wilderness of North America to set a light on hill, to basically create a more perfect society,

in quotes, according to their druthers. And to do so, they would be punished or rewarded collectively as a group, right? It's a covenant, like the Hebrews after Exodus. It's that kind of pledge they were all making together. So they deployed themselves as community groups. Each town, the goal wasn't individual freedom. It was the success of this utopian project, this effort to make this more godly place. And if the individual is getting in the way, well, the individual had to stand down. You monitored the individual. And so it was a

place where community and the success of the community mattered most, and also a place where education was prized. It had the highest literacy rates of any society in the early modern period when it was created, because for theological reasons, they believed that every citizen needed to read the Bible directly. And each town was a little republic unto itself with its own town meeting government. Each meeting hall, each town controlled all the matters of their local church. So all the aspects of life were controlled by the community directly. Fast forward in that, and you have a group of people who believe that the world can be made better now, can be made better through institutions,

government, if you will, and that when individual liberty and the common good come and clash, that it's the common good that needs to prevail. That's so interesting. And I can see evidence of that having lived in Yankee Dome for a good chunk of my life. And when we're talking about these time periods from history, we think about like people who came here in the 1700s, 1800s. Like it doesn't affect me anymore. I make my own choices, make my own decisions. But yet we are all absolutely products of our environment. 1800s, 1800s, like it doesn't affect me anymore. I make my own choices, make my own decisions.

But yet we are all absolutely products of our environment. And we are taught to believe certain things based on what our parents believed and where did they get it from, from their parents and from their parents, et cetera. So these cultural regions of the United States, they directly trace back to all of the original settlements of North America. The culture of your region exists because it has been upheld and reestablished and reinforced throughout hundreds and hundreds of years. Let's move on to Tidewater. This is obviously a very, very influential colonial project in the United States, had a significant impact on a variety of things the United States wanted to undertake, like many of the people who we think of as founding fathers, quote unquote, were from this region. What are some of the hallmarks of the Tidewater? The Tidewater was the most powerful of the regional cultures in the revolutionary period

and the early republic. And this is a culture that was founded around the same time as New England was founded by the Puritans and by English people, but a totally different set of English people. This was a society where the dominant settlement ended up being led by the younger sons, the second, third, fourth, fifth sons of the wealthy manor house owning gentry and nobility in the English countryside. And the problem for the second, third, fourth, and fifth sons is their older brother's the one who inherits the manor. So they get nothing. And that meant, you know, good luck, you know, go be in the army or join the priesthood or something. But with the discovery of the new world made it possible for them to contemplate something new,

that you could create a new manor. And so they were all going to replicate the semi-feudal environment of the English countryside in Virginia. And that, you know, that's why you have these giant enlightened gentlemen with Mount Vernon and Monticello. There were no towns really in early Virginia because every manor house was supposed to have its own dock and would ship directly to London. So that's what they were trying to create. But the effort to find someone who wanted to stand in as the serfs in the context of early America turned out to be very difficult. Nobody wanted to do that role. So they tried to use indentured servants. And then when even that failed, as soon as they finished their indentures, they would run off to have their own farms, not to hang around and be peasants for you,

you know, oh Lord. That's when they started falling straight into full-on racial slavery, modeled off the experience they were seeing already taking form in the deep South around Charleston. But it didn't start that way. It was supposed to be essentially a conservative society. Respect for authority and tradition, not a lot of emphasis on democratic participation by the masses. A society of enlightened gentlemen, nobles, running an idealized and rational system, supposedly. And when we're talking about Tidewater, we're talking about the eastern half of Virginia, we're talking about tidewater, we're talking about, you know, sort of the eastern half of Virginia, the eastern half of North Carolina, like the southern portion of Maryland,

you know, areas similar around the Chesapeake. Yeah, Chesapeake country, lower two counties of Delaware, eastern North Carolina, like you said, working its way into sort of, you know, a third to almost half of today's Virginia. Let's talk about the Deep South, which is probably exactly like what people picture when they think of the Deep South, except for two little sections, which we can talk about in a minute. But tell us about the early settlement patterns of the Deep South and how we can still see some of those beliefs and cultural aspects present in 2023. beliefs and cultural aspects present in 2023. People talk about the South, but there is no the South. There's two or three Souths. There's the Tidewater we just talked about, but the Deep South is a totally different take on things. Yes, it was a slave society, but it didn't start with any of those, oh, we are the enlightened manor lords and supposedly have our subjects' interests in mind.

It was rather colonized directly from Barbados by English slave lords there who'd run out of space on the island, who were bringing a chain gang slave system, work your slaves to death if you figure out the calculus of the value of sugar compared to human life, kind of awful society. And they were transplanted to recreate a West Indies plantation society in the subtropical lowlands of the North American continent. In fact, the early colony was called Carolina in the West Indies because people thought of it as being the same place. And they came and indeed replicated that society. Charleston, essentially the hearth there, is the architecture and everything else, especially back then,

were Caribbean-style architecture, much like places they'd left behind at home. This was a society that never had any pretenses. It was democratic or the interests of the people, in quotes, were in mind. It was oligarchic. It was a very top-down society. You can ask, how can this exist once you hit the American Revolution? Well, the twist is they saw themselves championing classical republicanism, meaning the republics of classical antiquity, ancient Greece and Rome, which were slave societies, right? You had a

small group of people in both places at the top of the, who had the privilege or the liberty of practicing democracy and subjugation and slavery with a natural lot of the many. So that was the model they were arguing for, drawing on all the power, and those were powerful arguments in the 17th century of what ancient Greece and ancient Rome had done, and were directly and explicitly saying that once Jefferson's Declaration of Independence came along, that Jefferson was wrong, that humans were unequal and only a tiny subset of humans, the oligarchs and their descendants, had the genius to practice the promises set forth in the Declaration. Let's talk a little bit more about the Spanish Caribbean, which is basically like the southern one-third of Florida. Yeah. So American Nations treats the 11

rival regional cultures of North America, of which there's nine big ones and some enclaves of smaller ones. And then there's a few others that aren't even treated in the book, including Spanish Caribbean. The book was to describe all the cultures where the hearths, the initial settlement zones, are in today's United States or Canada. So that left out the island of Newfoundland in Canada, which belongs to another culture, Hawaii, which belongs to the greater Polynesian space, and indeed the southern tip of Florida, which is the southern bit of a different Spanish imperial culture, not the El Norte one, but the Spanish Caribbean and maritime empire hubbed out of Havana, which was moving all of the silver, the Inca were being forced to mine and, you know, down in Peru and the gold that were being stolen

from the Aztecs and the treasures of Asia way off in the Spanish Philippines that were being collected and transhipped in a gigantic warship, like a Death Star style warship, bigger and more powerful than anything else that would once a year cross-style warship, bigger and more powerful than anything else, that would once a year cross the entire Pacific Ocean to Mexico and offload all the goodies from Asia. And all these things would come to the ports of the Spanish Caribbean, hub out of Cuba, and they would be shipped in giant treasure fleets back to Iberian Spain. And so Miami and the southern part of Florida has been part of that since the early days. What about, I find New Orleans culture so interesting, and you also talk about this

when you're talking about gun violence, this concept of New France, which is the southern portion of Louisiana. It is a very unique subculture within the United States. There is nothing similar to it. You can't be like, well, New Orleans is a lot like X, Y, and Z. There's nothing like it. There's nothing like it. And that's part of what makes it so interesting. It has all the histories, all the conquering armies, all the pirates. It has all of the things. Yeah, it's a wild place. And I mean, the New France part is a Cajun country and what they used to call the bourbon parishes where the French plantation

owners prior to US annexation between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. New Orleans itself, the reason it's so fascinating is not only is it New France, but it's also deep South. And it's also, I think, although this isn't said in the book, I think it's also Spanish Caribbean. It's a collision of three regional cultures cohabitating the place at once, which is why it's such a mashup, right? It's a Caribbean place. It's got French overtones. It's definitely got the deep Southern plantation, greater Gulf culture, all colliding together, which makes it a city like no other in the world, really. You know, we see more multiculturalism become more prevalent after the Great Migration, et cetera, throughout some of the northern cities. But New Orleans has been multicultural

from its inception. And that is, it's just, we could spend all day talking about New Orleans. But let us proceed. Let's proceed, Colin. Let's talk about Greater Appalachia. Greater Appalachia is the most populous of all of these regional cultures today, and it encompasses the Upland South. So there were Scots-Irish and Lowland Scots and people from the English Marches, the places in Britain that were the war-torn borderlands, essentially between Scotland and England. And later, when England conquered Northern Ireland, Lowland Scots were brought to conquer the Irish and hold down Ulster. So these are people in places where the institutional environment was very weak, where there was constant danger and upheaval.

You know, if you ever watch Mel Gibson's Braveheart, those are the lowland Scots. You know, a warrior culture in difficult circumstances, and fierce. You had to be fierce to protect your stuff. And they got a reputation, which is why Elizabeth I, when she was trying to conquer Northern Ireland from the Irish, brought the Lowland Scots to do it, because they had a reputation. And then you fast forward to the American colonial period, and people were trying to take all of the indigenous people's land. And so a lot of these great proprietors literally ordered up boatloads of Scots-Irish to come hold the frontier for them, to be a protective barrier between where we could sit back in the coast and have our fondue and wine, and the border people would go be

knocking heads and clashing with the people we'd stolen the land from. So that was a general model. And the big surge of people leaving came into the port of Philadelphia because that was run by the Quakers, we'll get to in a minute, and the Quakers were very open to immigration. And so they went straight to the Pennsylvania frontier in what were then staggering numbers. And their hearth is southwestern Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh and around Pittsburgh, that corner, tens of thousands pouring in all at once and then spreading down what was called the Great Wagon Road that allowed them to colonize all the way down the spine and uplands of the Appalachia to colonize the inland portions of what is now Virginia and West Virginia and North Carolina and a bit of South Carolina

and the upper fifth of Georgia and the upper third of Alabama and the top right corner of Mississippi and then onwards down through half of the Ozarks, through chunks of Missouri and Arkansas and on down to the Texas Hill Country and even Oklahoma. And then another branch was going on the other side of the mountains into Kentucky and then rafted down the Ohio River, colonizing both sides. It's a massive, sprawling regional culture where the emphasis is on individual liberty. We've got to keep government puny. We've got to keep institutions puny.

The individual and their liberty is what matters and their autonomy and anything that reduces that is a danger to freedom. that reduces that is a danger to freedom. And people also, you know, when we're talking about like the Appalachian region, we tend to think about like, okay, we're talking about West Virginia, right? Like we're talking about just these little chunk of land. But what you're talking about is these larger cultural expectations and beliefs that are a result of these sort of migration and settlement patterns. And your findings about what constitutes greater Appalachia is literally a huge chunk of Texas all the way over to including portions of Virginia, all of West Virginia, et cetera. So I would really encourage people to read this book, by the way, because it's very interesting. Okay, let's talk about the Midlands, which run all the way from Philadelphia,

the eastern seaboard, all the way over into a chunk of the Dakotas, down into the top of Texas. Tell me more about what the Midlands were and are. The Midlands were founded by another utopian English experiment, this time a very different group though. English Quakers first came into Delaware Bay and around what's now Philadelphia and upper part of Delaware and the southern New Jersey and chunks of southwestern Pennsylvania and spread onwards. And the Quakers were, unlike the Calvinists, thought that people were inherently good. They had an inner light. You could trust people. In the end, people were good eggs. And so one of the implications of that is they opened their doors to lots of people to come.

At a time when other colonies were more restrictive, anybody trying to flee Europe could come to the Quaker colonies and be welcomed. So these are people who looked upon government and the center of central states as often oppressive, And yet they were very communitarian, right? Trust your neighbors and stuff. The ethos is skeptical of top-down intervention, but very middle class and community-oriented. So kind of like halfway between the sort of Appalachian experience on their left and the Yankee one on the right side of their settlement stream. That myth of America as a melting pot, that's a Yankee concept. You come here, but you have to be like us. In the Midlands, it's no, come here and it's a salad. It's a mosaic,

right? Oh, you're Polish. Go have your village over there. Do your Polish thing. Have a Polish newspaper. Teach the kids in Polish. Same with neighborhoods. The checkerboards of neighborhoods, one's like a little part of Italy and another is a section of Germany. That was the model there. It wasn't a mixing up. It was this multicultural model. And that's what spread, but going through the middle, through Pittsburgh, through the Cumberland Gap, through the middle of Ohio and the upper part of Indiana and the middle part of Illinois, kind of clashing, sharing Chicago with the Yankees, and then spreading out into the plains, spreading out like a river delta out through most of Iowa and on

into large parts of Nebraska and the Dakotas, and even down into the very tippy top of Texas in a little strip as well. So it's a swing region in a sense, politically and otherwise, and a border region sandwiched between the poles of two cultures that they agree and disagree half and half with each of them. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends.

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You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. We have to get to talking about the Far West, which is by far the largest geographic area of the United States, although certainly not the largest population-wise. But this comes all the way from the western half of the Dakotas over to the eastern half of California, Washington, and Oregon. And I think when we think about the far west, we're thinking about

shootouts and saloons and wagon trains and things of that. We're thinking about a John Wayne movie set. That's what we think of. It's that environment. It's essentially the upper Great Plains, the arid plains. So starting at about the 100th meridian where you have to have irrigation or agriculture will fail, extending all the way through the mountains in the inner mountain west, excluding the coastal strip on the other side of the mountains, which was settled by a different group of people, and excluding the areas that the Spanish, south to north, had already settled by the time these Euro-American colonial waves started colonizing the interior west, which was the last place in the continental United States that they were able to colonize. The only way you could colonize that vast interior region was through the deployment ahead of time

of industrial stale capital. The railroad came first and the railroad companies settled the towns around them by a master plan. Even recruiting immigrants in Germany and giving them through tickets to get on a steamship, cross the Atlantic, board a train, ride to the place where their land parcel was already selected for them. I mean, like the railways really did choose what would happen or the federal government with its irrigation systems or the Anaconda coppers and Hearst corporations of the world controlling mines and other things. So it was the one part of the map where environment trumped ethnography. And so the characteristic is a group of people out there, you know, you have to be pretty self-sufficient to go live in these remote environments and maybe watch out for your neighbors, but you got to know how to do things yourself. And yet your whole existence is totally dependent on these external forces from outside the region, companies and things controlled and government forces controlled in Washington or Chicago or San Francisco or New York. And so that resentment, that dependent status and being exploited in various ways as a resource colony for the benefit of the other regional cultures is definitional in the spirit and

frustrations and aspirations of the far West. Let's talk very quickly about the last two regions. And then I want to talk about implications of the settlement patterns, these cultural norms that happen amongst these regions as it relates to topics like gun violence. So let's talk just very quickly about the left coast. Very briefly, that's the coastal strip starting in like Monterey, California, and working its way all the way up the coast of California and the coast of Oregon and Washington and British Columbia, and even the lower section down by Juneau of Alaska. It was colonized by two groups of people.

The lucky, wealthy ones were the ones arriving the easy way, which was by ship from New England, going around the tip of South America through the Tierra del Fuego or the Drake Passage and all the way up the South American coast to arrive and settle in the Golden Gate in San Francisco Bay or Puget Sound or the Columbia River. Amazing journey. And a lot of them were in New England spirit, believed that they were replicating the Mayflower voyage, that they had a new errand in the wilderness, that they were going to put a new light on the hill, create a new New England on the Pacific that humanity out in Asia could see the New England way. I mean, the same stuff that you'd heard in New England, but they weren't the only ones to come. Also coming at the same time, the hard way overland by wagon through the then unconquered far West with all of its difficulties

and indigenous people trying to stop you often, were coming from the Appalachian sections of the lower Midwest states primarily. And they were often arriving in the countryside. The Yankee New Englanders settled the cities, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and so on. A lot of the countryside was taken up by the miners, timber harvesters, fur traders, and the rest who were Appalachian. Now, those are two different cultures, but they created this fascinating hybrid, right? It's a society that's kind of utopian, a belief that we can remake the world and make it better,

which is kind of Yankee. But the emphasis is all on like individual self-actualization and, you know, find yourself and do your thing. And it ended up being pretty fecund because this place has a population of like 20 million all told, including the Canadian portions. And yet is the center of so many of the companies

that dominate the entire planet today. It's a very successful society in that regard, but it's created this fascinating hybrid. And disagrees and always has in absolutely everything. The left coast and the far west sections are always on the opposite side of every political divide in question in Washington and in Oregon and in California from the territorial period all the way through to the present. Yeah. There's portions of Oregon that are like, can we leave and be part of Idaho? Can we be part of Idaho?

That has been going on in various places in this country for a long time. But it's a great representation of exactly the principle that you were talking about. You saw this in the western portion of Maryland recently was like, you know what, let's join West Virginia. You're not like the rest of us that live out here. And so you see these cultural divides that happen within the ahistoric boundaries of the states. And then when the culture realizes that this boundary of the state does not represent my interests, I belong to this culture that is actually better represented by the interests of this other group over here. You can still see this exact argument playing out in 2023 in the United States. Let's talk about El Norte. So El Norte is really the first of these nations, if you will, within the United States to be colonized.

It was colonized south to north. It was that project, the northernmost frontier of the vast, Spain's vast empire in the Americas. And it was so far from the centers of power in Mexico City and indeed back in Madrid and Cadiz that it was like being on the moon. I mean, they were way isolated. And because of various policies and trade laws, they actually couldn't ship things by sea even. It all had to go overland in wagons over the arid north of Mexico to get back to central Mexico. And so it evolved its own characteristics. It was more entrepreneurial, ambitious, democratic-minded when that stuff started coming up. It ended up being the hotbed in the Mexican historical tradition of reform

and change. And the idea of being a people's in-between alienated from the more hierarchical top-down society of Mexico City, but different, again, from the United States itself, was always at the core. I want to talk a little bit about how these regional divides relate and pertain to gun violence in the United States today. And you have been studying this at the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University, and you have a great website that talks about this. And one of the things that I was very, very interested to see is the extraordinary, the extraordinary regional differences between gun violence rates based on these different cultural divides amongst what is now the United States. Can you give us a very high level overview

of some of your findings about how these cultural regions relate to gun violence rates? Yeah. At Nationhood Lab, we study various phenomenon where regionalism in America matters. And that turns out to be almost everything from elections through public health. And using this regional paradigm is actually capturing the differences between the regions in a historical and evidence-based way. And so we always knew that there were enormous geographical differences in violence in general documented for decades and indeed centuries by observers and scientists. And so we were able with taking data from the CDC and were able to track and map it. And the answer is, yeah,

enormous differences. I mean, whether you're looking at overall unintentional gun deaths, you know, homicides and suicides, or just homicides, or just per capita suicide rates, or just white per capita homicide rates versus white per capita homicide rates, or African-Americans in big cities rates versus those of whites in the big cities, you see the same patterns in almost every circumstance, which are a two and sometimes threefold difference between the most dangerous places like Deep South and the safer ones like Yankeedom. And what was really striking is that New Netherland, that area around, which is basically

metropolitan New York City today, New Netherland is far and away the safest place, no matter how you cut the data, in the entire continental United States, with rates roughly one-seventh or one-eighth that of the Deep South in whatever factor you're looking at. And so stunning and enormous differences, which trace back and can be explained in large part by differences in attitudes towards the role of violence and how you solve problems and how you solve affronts and arguments. That's fascinating that we tend to think of like, ooh, New York City, scary, so scary. It's fascinating though that they have some of the lowest gun violence rates today. But this is one

of the other things that I found very, very interesting about your maps, which everyone can check out at nationhoodlab.org, and there's a whole section on the geography of US gun violence, that when you're looking at gun violence rates, homicide, et cetera, overall, Yankeedom is one of the safest regions, especially if you are white. But it is not one of the safest regions if you are African American. Why is that? Why such a disparity? That was one of the striking things. In almost anything we looked at, it would be Yankee-dom, Midlands, New Netherland, Left Coast are safe, and Deep South, Greater Appalachia are bad. Sometimes the Far West would be bad as well. But you saw that pattern over and over again, others sort of in between. But yeah, we were expecting to see the same thing if we took

African-American rates. So the Centers for Disease Control, from which the best data exists, the problem with the data is because it's the CDC, they look at everything as a disease that they have to protect people's privacy. So they actually suppress the data. If the county's number gets too small, they just erase it and won't let you see what it is at all, which means we're doing, this is all the stats were over a 11-year period, 2010 to 2020. The safe and the dangerous and quote sheregions to be African-American flipped, especially for homicide, where suddenly, by far, the most dangerous places ceased to be the Deep South and Greater Appalachia, but ended up being the Midlands and Yankeedom and the left coast, the ones that are otherwise safe. So we wonder what that is. And again, we couldn't

crunch all the numbers for rural because of the same data suppression problem. But the CDC did let us see their smoothed rates for the counties. And you could see by eyeballing it, you could see what rural areas were safe and dangerous. And the answer is, you know, that the Midlands and Yankee, on the left coast, rural areas are quite safe. And you could see in the cities, there are, for African Americans, these hotspots. There are a handful of hotspot cities that really, really are dangerous per capita. In the Bay Area, it's probably driven by Oakland, but San Francisco Bay Area and Kansas City and Philly and Baltimore and Chicago among them, but not some other cities like Boston and Minneapolis and Seattle. And if I were a gun violence researcher, I would want to understand why is that? And why are these cities different than some of the other northern cities in that respect with such different rates? So I don't have the answers, but it does raise really intriguing questions. I want to go back to something you just said very briefly, just so that people can have clarity on this. When you're talking about

getting this data from the CDC, and that they sort of erase the data when you get to be in regions that are sort of too small. Is that for privacy? If you're querying something that's too small, yeah, from their point of view, they're the CDC, so they're looking at everything like it's a disease and it has to be HIPAA protected. And of course, gun homicides aren't private at all. It's all public what happens. So it's ridiculous to do it for homicide. And suicide, in a legal sense, isn't protected by HIPAA. So it's unfortunate that they do that, but it seems to be that their overall approach is treating it as another disease, and therefore they're just going to throw the same privacy restrictions. of cancer in this one rural county in the year 2017 that you'd be able to figure out, you know, that your neighbor who got sick had that disease. So that's their logic. It shouldn't apply to guns. It's silly that it does. But unfortunately, that's the case at the moment.

What should people do with this information? Let's say you are somebody who's looking at your website. You're going to nationhoodlab.org and you're like, that's fascinating. Why is it so dangerous to live in Yankeedom if you're African-American, but so safe if you're white? What should people be doing with this knowledge in your estimation, Colin? Well, with the overall knowledge, if you're concerned about the mass shootings and everything else that's happening, and you're hoping to convince your fellow Americans to take X or Y policy recommendation, the way you would go about that argument will be very different depending on which regional culture you're in the midst of.

I mean, to put it finely, I mean, if you're in greater Appalachia and you want gun policy X to be considered by your fellow citizens, the argument's going to have to be framed around, look, if you do X, it is going to help you protect yourself and your family from harm. And if you're going to Yankeedom and you want the same policy X, you're going to be saying policy X will make our community safer. And if you did the opposite argument in each place, it wouldn't work as well, because it doesn't resonate the same way with the purposes of why you have weaponry and what the dominant need and value is to protect freedom and have a good society. And so knowing that

allows you useful tactical information if you're going to try to engage to improve or alter the system however you want to do it. That's a really good point, that it allows you to tailor arguments based on what people in your cultural region value. Because as we just spent quite a while establishing, people value different things. And that one argument, if you're from the left coast, that is not going to fly in the deep South. Right. And you also may be able to borrow some things like if researchers were able to figure out why is it that far Westerners have the same gun homicide rates as other places with a history of frontier and all that kind of stuff. What is it about those places?

If you figured out what that was, could you encourage or make use of some aspects of that in other regions? I don't know, but that's another value to it is it gives you that possibility. And it also lets you know where bad problems are. I mean, the far westerners already knew this, but the suicide rate being that high, clearly there's a problem with social isolation, especially for men, this cultural idea that you have to solve problems yourself and that you don't, you know, don't go asking for help and, you know, talk about your problems, right? You have that stoic thing. Those are all really bad things when you're talking about suicide risk. And so, I mean, we're not telling far Western experts anything they don't know, but it's that kind of information that can be valuable to people, especially when you discover something that wasn't noticed before. What other kinds of things, before we wrap up, what other kinds of things does Nationhood Lab study?

So we have these regions, we talked a little bit about gun violence. What other kinds of topics does this apply to and what other types of resources do you have available? Yeah, we do two things. So we do other regional analysis like this, like we've done per capita COVID vaccination rates, which have similar differences between the regions and for similar reasons. We do politics, election results, the 2022 midterms. We'll do future elections coming up. We'll probably be doing stuff on the enormous differences in per capita life expectancy

between the regions. Things like credit scores, historical phenomenon as well, a whole range of things that come up in life from public health to policy differences to politics. But also the bigger thing that we're doing at Nationhood Lab, I mean, the truth is that we're this balkanized federation, but the real challenge is how do we keep the United States together? How do we find common ground between enough of the regional cultures, at least, that you could govern this place, that we can find things that we do agree on, even as we disagree on other things, to find that center? Why should the red states and blue states stay together?

Why should Yankeedom and the Deep South be in the same country? Why America is what you're really talking about. And that is about what the country is about, the story about who we're supposed to be. Where did we come from? For what purpose are we here? Where are we going? Who belongs? And the wonky term is that's a national narrative or national story. We're working on our old one to reboot it and update it and sort it out so people can understand what it means here and now. The old one, which is that we're committed to a set of ideals in the preamble, but doing it via testing it and working it out in different regions. How do you talk about it? And

how do you talk about it to real people out there? Not with a lofty language, but with things that make sense in real contexts. So that's some of the core work we're doing. Fascinating. Colin, we could keep talking for many hours. This was absolutely just as interesting as I knew it would be. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. I could have talked for many, many, many more hours to Colin. I find geography very interesting. Of course, you know, I love history. and so this is like the perfect convergence of history and geography. You can check out nationhoodlab.org at Salve Regina University, which is where Colin Woodard's work is housed. You can also check out his book that I referenced a number of times, American Nations, A History of the 11 Rival Regional

Cultures of North America. It is absolutely fascinating. Again, you can find his work at nationhoodlab.org. I'll see you again soon. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.