See “The Nine Nations of North America,’’ by Joel Garreau
— Map by A Max J -
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Colin Woodard’s book Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood is at its core a narrative of how wishful thinking, racism and willful ignorance led historians to promote pictures of America that ignored the huge impact of slavery/Jim Crow and regionalism. (Note that a previous Woodard book was entitled American Nations.)
He sees the United States as having developed mostly region by region -- politically, economically and culturally -- and not in a unitary way. Consider “Greater New England’’; the Planter Class of Tidewater Virginia and Maryland down to Georgia, and the tough Scots-Irish in the Border States and interior South. The caste system that developed with slavery had a great deal to do with how the last two groups turned out.
Mr. Woodard mostly tells his tale through biographies of five people: New England’s George Bancroft (1800-1891), a very intellectually dishonest but popular historian; South Carolina writer and politician William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a romanticist of the slave-owning South, especially its “aristocratic’’ coastal Planter Class; Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) the great abolitionist, orator and writer; historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), whose theories about sectionalism and the role of the frontier revolutionized the teaching of American history, and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the deeply racist president, political scientist and popular historian.
After reading this book I was again reminded of how it still sometimes seems more a collection of quasi-countries than a unified country. Just look at our national elections up to last November!
