Eleven Nations, 2017
Web Design, Coding
The map you see here is based on Colin Woodard's 2012 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.
The United States has never been a united country. America as we know it today was an amalgamation of European colonies of vastly different empires, all with distinct cultural values and practices. Such cultures defined and separated the colonies they belonged to. And after the country's founding, during major waves of European immigration, Scots, Italians and Irishmen further contributed to the cultural ideologies of the U.S. that still exist today.
Such differences reside in our politics, our social values, and our religions. Woodard argues that this is why our country has historically and contemporarily continuously engaged in ideological and economic warfare with itself. The mosaic of American voices, despite public opinion, far supersedes a simple conservative versus liberal binary.
Americans are taught that only the boundary lines of 50 states geographically separate the United States. But Woodard argues that these boundaries are arbitrary. He instead proposes eleven nation-states, mapped here in this project. While some may be allied with each other with respect to politics and economics, they are all vastly different from one another, grounded in separate founding ethnic groups and cultures.
Unfortunately, the platform used to build this site, Google's Fusion Tables, has been discontinued and the site is no longer functional.
