One of the things I’ve heard Americans say again and again is that “we don’t have an accent”—a statement which suggests that our culture is homogenous and nondescript. This is a profoundly annoying and difficult thing for an anthropologist to parcel given that with each culture you have to figure out its underlying logical structure. This is something that cultures overtly share through a variety of things such as their religion, media, childrearing, literature, philosophy, art, fashion, military, and everything else. Cultures operate through a series of statements about how the world works and who their people are that unconsciously permeate the entire nature of that society. A culture simply cannot help but exist. There must always be an underlying operating system which relates to the lived experience of the people in a given area and its geography, living conditions, ethnic breakdown, and history.
It is truly remarkable that people, even very educated Americans, know almost nothing about the peoples of America. America is a fairly diverse nation even by the standards of continent-sized countries. Regional diversity is baked into America’s governmental structure in a way that is often not the case for countries formed around their capital city, such as France forming around Paris and Russia around Moscow, which are prominent in the Old World. Until the time of the U.S. Civil War, Americans frequently referred to their nation as “these United States,” for they saw it as a series of distinct nations rather than a singular country. The Founders established America purposefully so that the highly distinct regional cultures, which were seen as independent nations, would have as much functional legal independence through the state structure as possible.
Anthropological metrics show that the cultural differences inside America exist at the same scale as between European countries. The cultural distance between a Pennsylvanian and a Californian is roughly equivalent as that from a German to a Pole. The political and worldview differences between a Californian and Texan are greater than those between a Greek and an Italian. The genetic differences between British Americans from the North and South are large enough that they are comparable to what we would expect were there a mountain range or desolate desert on the Mason-Dixon line. To understand how these vast differences emerged, we shall look at the history and development of the peoples of America through their distinct geographic, ancestral, and ethnic contexts. These are the three metrics which I think would best allow the integration of America’s identity as a people, not just its borders and land.
The Geography of Culture
There are two main geographic gradients in North America. One is cold to warm weather, from the tropical jungles of Florida to the frozen wastes of Alaska. The other is wet to dry, between the temperate rainforests of Washington State and the moon-like Mojave Desert in California. America is the only nation on Earth which has each of the main geographic biomes from deserts to forests, tropics, tundra, and grasslands. North America rarely has clean breaks in the climate and you can see this manifest in the culture, where there are few sharp borders between American subregions.
In this way America is much like China, another continent-sized nation with real but muddied regional differences, that coincidentally spans the nearly the same latitudes as the lower 48 states. Beijing sits at the 40th parallel, like Philadelphia, Harbin in Manchuria is at Quebec’s, New Orleans with Shanghai, and Hong Kong at Havana. It is more than coincidence that both potential twenty-first century powers have long ago expanded to fill their region’s entire available temperate zone. In this way both are unlike Europe, where countries with distinct regional cultures match the shape of the changing landscape. Perhaps, had the Roman Empire survived, the geographic distinctions between Gaul and North Africa would be similarly muted by an empire that endured until the present. This is America.
People in Pennsylvania, a clearly Northern state, often have glimmers of Southern accents and culture. Meanwhile, Northern culture has made inroads into every region of the South. A great irony is that “General American” culture; the accents, food, housing, ways of life, and class relations which are considered quintessentially American are from Pennsylvania, Upstate New York and Ohio, where the region had a decisive advantage due to the Industrial Revolution. However, as a person from this region, they now feel completely culturally alienated and isolated from the originally “General American” institutions in places like Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. These were initially manifestations of the rural Anglo culture and have since become their own, often with explicitly Anti-American interests, especially the peoples and regions it originated in.
Political analysts often observe that America has perfect geography, but they forget how much technology has made the North American continent significantly more habitable than it was centuries ago. Between the malarial swamplands of the south, the desert plains and mountains of the west, and the biting cold of the north, much of America had to be made artificially hospitable to host a large civilization. As an example, John McNeill’s book Mosquito Empires, explains how the defining factor in the evolution of the American South was disease; unsurprising when one considers how it sits at the same latitude as North Africa, with Austin, Texas and Cairo, Egypt at equal distances from the equator. Diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, dengue, and sleeping sickness were truly horrible in the coastal regions of the American South, often culling sixty to eighty percent of newcomers within six months of their arrival. The region that was liable to these tropical illnesses was surprisingly large, stretching all the way up to the Chesapeake Bay, and being often deadly for Europeans, with Philadelphia facing several yellow fever outbreaks. McNeill developed the concept of a region called the Greater Caribbean, which stretched from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro, and was the region where these tropical illnesses were the defining variable shaping society.
Life in the South demanded adaptation to a novel subtropical climate. The American South has a climate similar to India, which developed their own convergent caste system due to its Northern conquerors four thousand years ago. Records from the Colonial and Early Republic periods talk about how British migrants to the region experienced periodic panics at the mass deaths from disease in the first few years. The summer heat was seen as all-consuming, and helped create the aristocratic culture which scorned the Northern bourgeoisie as “ungentlemanly.”
It is hard to overstate how much disease influenced the development of the American South, a nebulous region that stretches from where I grew up, the Mason-Dixon line out west, through the Lower Midwestern states until it hits the Great Plains. Driving across what is essentially an ethnic divide between the Northern and Southern states that cuts through Maryland and Virginia, there’s a profound and palpable difference in architecture, climate, plants, and people on each side of that line.
An interesting exception is the southern half of Florida, as the region was an uninhabitable swampland until technology became sufficiently advanced in the mid-twentieth century to drain the swamp and wipe out the diseases, turning the land into a viable home. Given that this occurred in what could be called the South’s century of humiliation, between the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow, Florida was populated by Northern, especially New York, interests. Florida is today a strange slapdash state, the northern half acting as an extension of the Deep South, while further down the peninsula is occupied by migrants from the North-East, Midwest, and the most prominent city Miami having been reshaped by Cuban refugees, that today has grown into the capital of Latin America which happens to be on U.S. soil.
The reason Americans imported slaves from Africa was because these populations had developed genetic adaptations to tropical illnesses that originated in Africa. One example is the genetic mutation that causes sickle cell anemia, which likely contributed to and spread with the Bantu migrations four thousand years ago across Africa from Cameroon. African Americans form about twelve percent of America’s population today, and were almost entirely brought over as slaves during the 18th century, with the ancestor of the average African American coming over around 1750, compared to the average European ancestor around 1790.
The largest place of origin in Africa for Black Americans depends on subregion, which follows from how even the South operated as a series of independent nations during the Colonial period. The Chesapeake Bay was populated mostly by slaves from Nigeria, especially the Igbo and Yoruba peoples. This was because the Chesapeake’s main crop of tobacco was not profitable enough to buy more expensive slaves, given that the Igbo and Yoruba were known as the most freedom-loving people on Africa’s western shore. Senegalese herder peoples, like the Wolof, predominated in parts of Maryland and Louisiana, partly due to the French colony there and because the nomadic warrior peoples were known as difficult to control. Meanwhile, the Deep South cultivated more expensive crops like rice, indigo, cotton and sugar, allowing them to purchase more costly slaves from Angola and the Kongo. The Kongo was a totalitarian state where the king treated his subjects basically as slaves already, so they were cowed enough to be known as high quality slaves to the Europeans. The largest nation of origin for African Americans’ ancestry is Nigeria, constituting roughly one third of the total population.
There is a critical tension in America between the geographic regions which are best seen as extensions of a European civilization, which succeeded at subduing the land given it was similar enough to their European homes, and those in which the land successfully broke their culture from its European frame. Examples of the first are the British offshoot cultures we’ll talk about in the next segment, which dominate most of the Eastern part of the continent, and then a very prime but early example of a culture molded around the land is the American Deep South.
The Deep South started around Charleston, South Carolina in the 17th century due to the cultivation of luxury crops. Unlike the rest of the American East Coast, which was populated by distinct British subcultures who successfully crossed the Atlantic, the Deep South was settled by White Barbadians. In the 17th century the island of Barbados contained mostly Europeans who settled there to grow tobacco, however the later introduction of sugar crops caused them to migrate to the American South. The Deep South was the only region of the country that had a majority Black population, somewhere between sixty and eighty percent before the African American migrations North during the 20th century.
The new European Barbadian occupants subsequently became quite martial and aggressive, cultivating an almost Nietzschean “master morality,” as a way to keep down the massive Black population. This has consistently been the most militaristic and combative region in American history, as the looming threat of a Haiti-like race revolt was always lurking. That being said, the Deep South became a distinct synthesis of African and European elements where Blacks and Whites lived in profound proximity with utter brutality. The book The World They Made Together details the African influence on White Southern culture, touching on everything from food and religion to architecture, clothing, and childrearing practices. This merging of cultures went on to shape much of modern America, eventually giving rise to new music genres, cuisines, fashion trends, and colloquialisms.
East of the 100th parallel it’s easier to pretend that America is the same as Europe, as it shares much of the same plants, climate, animals, and agriculture. However, west of that line it becomes impossible. The land of the American West borders on mythical, from the purple clouds of Texas to the purple mountains of Arizona. There are redwood trees that are thousands of years old, the extraterrestrial landscape of Death Valley, the colossal Rocky Mountains, and massive herds of buffalo who roam the seemingly infinite Great Plains. There’s an interesting argument that the American Empire, which later spanned nearly every continent, was first built in order to secure the sheer scale of the American West. It’s truly a wonder that America from sea to shining sea is a single nation, and it could only have been formed in that particular moment of history when energetic Europeans had a staggering technological advantage over the local population. Penetrating across the west took profound will, and it is truly remarkable that America reached from Pittsburgh to San Francisco in a sixty year period from 1790-1850. If you look at a genetic map of America you will find that the British-derived cultures which stem back to the East Coast wither at the 100th parallel, gradually replaced by the new cultures of the American West. This is because the Easterners were unable to survive once they found themselves in a world without trees.
Due to the sheer scale of the American West, it has always been totally dependent on gargantuan infrastructure projects such as the transcontinental railroad or thousands of miles of canals and aqueducts, proving Americans to be engineers on the same scale as the Romans. Many cities in the American West simply could not exist without the greatest engineering in human history. Cities like Las Vegas or Phoenix support populations of millions hundreds of miles deep in the desert with highly fragile water supplies. Anglo-American culture never had to consider the problem of lack of water before this point, and you can see the ingenuity demonstrated in practices such as growing cotton in Arizona from limited aquifer water. Meanwhile, that incredibly water-intensive crop can be grown naturally in the American South without irrigation.
In much of the American West, the story of urbanization is the story of water. In states like Texas, Arizona, California, and Utah, lack of water is the primary bottleneck to their success and is thus fought over tooth and claw by special interests. The Great Plains were populated in an unusually wet period of the late 19th century, which coincided with settlement, causing scientists at the time to theorize that “rain follows the plow.” The severe storms of the Dust Bowl that followed in the 1930s dramatically falsified this hypothesis, as well as driving a mass migration to the West to escape the Great Plains. To this day some parts of this region have barely a third of the population they did in the 1920s.
Total dependence on these enormous infrastructure projects has become the dominant variable in the success of the American West. One manifestation of this is how the megacorporation has become a feature of the West since the 19th century, as these grand infrastructure projects gave the corporations who built them enormous monopoly power that has potential for exploitation. These important corporations in the American West have often engaged in demographic transfer when it suits their interests. For example, the purposeful importation of Scandinavians into the Upper Midwest to populate the northern rail networks. A similar process occurred in central Canada with Romanians and Ukrainians. The West Coast agricultural sector encouraged mass migration of Midwesterners in the early 20th century. In recent history, large corporations have furthered the demographic replacement of the South-West with migrants from Latin America.
This is, in effect, a society where the infrastructure projects are important enough that they become a variable in their own right, which supersedes the organic culture. This is very rare historically, where most societies are quite geographically or ethnically set in stone. The American West’s main political gripe in the late 19th and early 20th century was that the railroad and mining companies had enormous monopolistic influence over trade in the region, which they often used to exploit it. This was a large reason for the rise of Progressive populism in the Upper Midwest and West around 1900, with William Jennings Bryan as a popular leader.
All of the cultural trends of the American West have been especially pronounced in the Intermountain West between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. The Intermountain West is a funny region much like Asia, with a gradient of individually distinct cultures with similarities all of which are reactions to their environment. The first example are the Mormons of Utah and the neighboring states, which migrated into the region in the mid 19th century from New England and the Upper Midwest. They are genetically similar to those populations and organized around the eccentric spiritual figure Joseph Smith, who created a religion that guided the Mormons to the Great Salt Lake in hopes of establishing an independent nation named Deseret to be a new city on the hill, much as their Calvinist ancestors fled from England to New England. In the 19th century the central Mormon church would strategically orchestrate its settlement patterns in advance. The Mormons dealt with a geography like the Middle East by creating a Middle Eastern-style theocracy. They have many similarities with the Ancient Israelites: being seen as a cult by outsiders, purposefully strange beliefs to isolate them, high in-group preference, strong religiosity, high birth rates, high educational attainment, and a unique moral character.
Contrasted with the conservative Mormons, the other polarity of the American West is the degeneracy that comes from an utterly artificial environment in which older cultures can’t survive. One example of this are the people who were locally called “Desert Trash” and learned to view it with pride. They form an almost Scots-Irish Appalachian ethic of resistance to power, individuality, and eccentricity. However, they’ve traded murder ballads, clan lineages, and honor codes for Instagram, UFOs, New Age spirituality and suburban houses with white interiors. Arizona and Nevada are the top Desert Trash states, but the culture ripples from internal California and the deserts of Oregon to the Rocky Mountains’ ridges. If modern civilization ever collapses, they are the ones most likely to form a new almost Mongol culture to rebuild the region.
Another environmental response is seen in California, today an artificial culture which was once considered to be a distant Eden too inaccessible for Europeans to reach without profound struggle. It was a backwater of a backwater for the Spanish Empire, where the Franciscan fathers enslaved the Natives. The Spanish were the original settlers of the American South-West and even parts of Florida, but by the time the Anglo-Americans conquered it they were declining as an empire and had only a few thousand people in the region. The exception here is New Mexico, which stands alone in the American South-West as a more Latino-Native American derived culture based off of the medieval Puebla culture which made enormous megaliths like the one in Chaco Canyon. They along with the Mexicans faced countless declines and imperial collapses due to water issues.
Within months of the U.S. conquering California, Americans immediately found gold which the Hispanics had missed for the past eighty years. California has always carried the mark of the Booster; a certain archetype that today would be promoting nootropics and NFTs, but in the 19th century built towns, states, and businesses, constantly hustling and selling across the continent. The founders of California were scammers, gold miners, pirates, entrepreneurs, slavers, and adventurers. This has made the Golden State the cutting edge of Western civilization and the most important place on Earth in the latter part of the 20th century. At the same time, it has made the region prone to foolishness and degeneracy, which was further promulgated by the region’s staggeringly rapid rise to wealth in industries which do not touch physical reality, such as technology, media, and government military contracts.
This separation from reality has created a fantastical society of wizards bending reality to their will, who have gone mad from their power and are now set on destroying both their own culture and the world. The Edenic California of the 20th century no longer exists, and has been replaced by a cross between Blade Runner and the degeneracy of ancient atheists’ multicultural Babylon or Rome. California is the story of a society that has everything—wealth, genius, perfect geography, strong political institutions, and military protection—brought down by the one thing it does not have: a functioning culture, which later bled into its entire political, economic, and demographic success.
Keep in mind that most of the American West as a whole was profoundly lightly populated until recently. One of my good friends is a native Washingtonian and another an old stock Californian, and both feel that the places they grew up have now been irrevocably destroyed. They belonged to the old cowboy Western culture, while its new inhabitants are trying to build a post-Christian, post-Western, possibly transhumanist society, which we see manifest most clearly with Silicon Valley’s various strange ideologies.
The Pacific Northwest is a strange example of a fusion civilization that was never able to integrate either elements of its parent societies, while also not developing its own personality distinct from its politics. The Pacific Northwest is a mix of Yankees: there was a coin toss to determine if Portland, Oregon would be named after Portland, Maine or Boston, Massachusetts. However, it contains many similarities to the rest of the West Coast and California. The climate here is surprisingly like Western Europe, and the mix of New England and California has created potentially the most left-wing place on earth, where politics are used as a surrogate for their ancestor’s religious fanaticism.
As a final example of how American geography affects its culture we have the original White Anglo inhabitant of the West, the one who used to be synonymous with it but has since been forgotten, that being the cowboy. It’s hard to underestimate the effect of the cowboy on the American character, especially our perception outside the U.S. The cowboy speaks to something that exists in America and in very few other places: the self-controlled individual who is not dependent on society. This has very deep roots in our psyche stemming back to the Aryan steppelands and later the Vikings, Crusaders, and age of European colonialism. There is something in the Faustian European man, which only still exists in America, that desires to wander and test the boundaries of sociability. The American cowboy is a mix of African, Native American, and Spanish influences on people whose ancestors were shepherds on the fringes of the British Isles’ herding cultures. Starting in South Texas, the cowboy is a manifestation of the European reaching back to his ancestral environment of the Eurasian steppe as a reaction to a region that was not farmable until the late 19th century, due to the soil being so deep it would break plows and far too many buffalo. The true age of the cowboy lasted only twenty years after the U.S. civil war, until technological innovations such as a new type of plow, barbed wire to keep the cows out, and the invention of the revolver to defeat the Natives, amongst others, allowed the Great Plains to be settled. Regardless, the cowboy tapped into an underlying nature of the American West’s land: a climate like the Eurasian steppe will produce men like the Mongols or Huns, as Natives like the Apache, Comanche, or Sioux demonstrated.
Ancestral Seeds
It’s a consistent thread in American history that so many of its battles are the Old World’s writ large, on the scale of a new continent with new backgrounds. One of my favorite historians, Leland Dewitt Baldwin, called America a side effect of the English Civil War. This has been a continuous thread in American history until the present, which we have collectively blocked out. For example, the hatred between the North and South, which traces back to Britain, is still alive and well today. Ask any self-respecting Bostonian or Alabamian about the other and you’ll see a loathing that goes deeper than Enlightenment reason. I’m of half Irish and half British ancestry, and my grandparents were not happy about my parents’ Protestant-Catholic marriage in the 1990s. We had the marriage in a Protestant church overseen by a Catholic priest to make sure both ancestral gods would be happy about the union. Even today, the different British regional cultures which populated America are totally evident in voting patterns, architecture, religion, dialect, values, and any other signal that would demonstrate a distinct culture anthropologically. These different genetic groups, often stemming back to different subregions of the British Isles, are totally apparent in America, with about sixty percent of Americans having British heritage.
Inside the British Isles there has always been the struggle between the core and the fringe. This divide cuts across any straightforward categorization, but as a vague rule of thumb: the interior was more ordered, rational, egalitarian, bureaucratic, Germanic, and Protestant; the exterior was more wild, mystic, hierarchical, traditional, Celtic, and mythic. If you look at the English Civil War which occurred at America’s inception, the feudal West of England supported the closeted Catholic Stuart Scottish line and the capitalist East supported the Puritan-dominated Parliament. There’s an interesting book called The Cousins’ Wars by Kevin Philips which looks at how the English and American civil wars were largely the same conflict. It is truly eerie that when you map the English Civil war onto the American, you’ll find that on an incredibly granular level the same bloodlines fought the same battles. In both conflicts the Puritan line which lead to the Northern ice sheet burned the Cavaliers who fought for warm and civil Wessex and Dixie.
The book Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer is a brilliant analysis of how the British regional migrations to America seeded the current American Eastern cultures that stretch from the East Coast to the Great Plains. The first major migration was from Puritan Eastern England to New England in the early 17th century during their persecution by the King. Much like the Icelanders fleeing the king of Norway’s tyranny in the 9th century, the Puritans aspired to make a city on a hill in which they could build an earthly Calvinist utopia. The Puritans belonged to potentially the most radical sect of Christians ever. They would fine people for not working on Christmas, for arguing with their wife too loudly, and for swearing. The Puritans were the most intelligent, industrious, and capable English of that era, but this came at the cost of profound psychological and spiritual neuroses which have affected this region ever since. If you look at New England’s character it is clearly a theocracy, whether the religion is Progressive or Calvinist, where the priests take leadership over businessmen or nobility.
New England was a nearly totally homogenous ethnostate for most of American history, with this singular type of person most prominent. This resulted in New England being the single society in the world that scored highest on practically every human development statistic, as detailed by Fischer. They were the most equal, literate, skilled, agentic, and technologically advanced population in the world. Yankees, as the descendents of the Puritans were called, sailed as pirates all the way to Madagascar, sold furs to the Chinese, staged a coup in Hawaii, and hunted for whales in Siberia and Antarctica. They were the most capable group of Americans, ever. They populated a whole tier of the continent through dominating the American side of the Great Lakes region and then sailing over to Deseret (now Utah) as well as the Pacific shore by way of Antarctica. They averaged ten children per household in this colonial period, and so like rabbits entering an island with no natural predators, this fairly small group of Puritans has ballooned to tens of millions of descendents. Keep in mind that each of these four British groups have populations of tens of millions, often more than entire European countries.
A majority of non-Hispanic White American ancestry is of British origin, which is something that has been written out of our cultural narrative. However, this great Yankee era, in which they finally defeated their nemesis, the Deep South, came with a staggering psychic and spiritual toll. After their religion died, most of New England became nearly empty forest while their diasporas assimilated into local cultures. New England started to commit suicide as a society, building all of its social institutions around the destruction of its own culture. When one of its greatest writers, H.P. Lovecraft, wrote of decayed, haunted, exotic New England fishing towns lost to their past, he was speaking to a long-term decline of Yankee America that had already occurred by the 20th century. Their victories since have been in the form of the nihilistic managerial class, which has come at an enormous cost: their cultural identity and individual spirit.
The other side of the mutual failure of the English Civil War was the Cavaliers, who after the Puritans installed a military dictatorship in England at the end of the war, fled to Virginia and the Chesapeake to escape to a place where they could be loyal to their king. They tried to establish an aristocratic culture there that could replicate what they had back in Europe, however there were not enough European settlers to be their serfs, and so they brought in slaves from Africa. David Hackett Fischer has said that the culture of the American South dates back to England, and that Africans were merely brought in to support it. The 19th century novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell speaks of a South of England, formerly known as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, that was known for being genteel, slow moving, kind, hierarchical, bigoted, and conservative; this is word-for-word how people describe the American South. At its best, the American South, stemming originally from this Virginian mold which spread to the rest, would produce the greatest men in American history like Washington, Jefferson, Lee, and Madison. At its worst, it would produce the worst human development statistics in America and the horrors of slavery.
The South contained the only deep aspiration to nobility and high culture we have in America, while attempts by the Trans-Atlantic North-Eastern WASP were never able to organically integrate into America’s soil, and died by the late 20th century. Virginia and its cousins populated a truly huge region of America, accounting for more immigrants to the West than all the Northern States combined. Virginians founded Berkeley University in California, named after the father of Virginia and popularizer of slavery Sir William Berkeley, as well as the state of Texas, the Upper South, and the Southern Piedmont regions.
The third American culture was the other one that Elizabeth Gaskell spoke of in North and South: the diaspora from the English Rust Belt to the American Rust Belt. When she wrote of the North of England in the 19th century being a rough, manly, egalitarian, industrial, low class, mercantile, Darwinistic place, she could have been talking about the American Rust Belt just as easily. The modern English Rust Belt was once a desolate frontier region populated by Celts and Vikings, until a combination of the Quaker’s high trust and business acumen alongside the coal deposits found in Pennsylvania and the English Rust Belt created the Industrial Revolution.
The Quakers were instrumental in the foundation of the English and American banking systems as they had enough cultural trust to easily accumulate capital. Their immigration to America was facilitated by William Penns’ land grant in Pennsylvania, which caused him to encourage Quaker settlement there as it was one of the few places with religious freedom. Quakers, also known as the “Religious Society of Friends,” are a pacifist, meditation-based sect of Christianity, which was seen as profoundly radical in a world of mandatory churches and nobility. They established Pennsylvania and the neighboring areas as anarcho-capitalist societies which were as close to pure classical liberalism as possible, with total religious and economic freedom. This subsequently made the area one of the wealthiest and best developed places in the world for centuries after. The idea of the American “melting pot” originated in Pennsylvania, the one “diverse” region in colonial America due to its Scottish and German migrants.
The Quaker thread in America’s history has been largely forgotten, but is arguably the most important of these four lineages for creating the Middle-American character which came to dominate general American culture. In the Quaker diaspora, which spread out to Nebraska and Kansas, they succeeded at pollinating an open, friendly, hardworking, libertarian, yet communal and conservative society. The Quakers themselves were fairly demographically small, but their culture was very successful at creating “Friendlies” as allies, which gave them a stamp of approval in the middle tier of America’s culture. At its best, Quakerism can form some of the best societies in history. And at its worst is prone to profound naivety and paradoxical insularity: there is a reason both the English and American Rust Belts had some of the most rapid societal declines of any place on Earth in the last century.
The final of the Albion’s Seed cultures is the Borderers, or the Scots-Irish. They originated in Lowland Scotland, Northern England, and Northern Ireland. This culture was something very ancient to the British Isles, dating back to the closest thing to the original pre-Roman pre-literate, warrior clan societies. These peoples evolved in constant battle between different authorities, whether Scottish, English, or Irish, in a world where there was constant violence either between armies or proud warrior clans. We forget that into the 17th and 18th centuries these Celtic clan peoples had political authority and fought the centralized government. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Scottish army at Culloden nearly took London in 1745.
This region suffered terrible poverty, and many who had migrated to Ireland to replace the local Irish were not satisfied with their new way of life under English landowners. This created a radically anarchist, libertarian culture which has kept America masculine, real, and tough while also producing the worst human development statistics of every kind among British Americans. Today, Appalachia is a poor, desolate, and dying place, while their cousins in Tennessee and Texas are part of the fastest growing and strongest places in America. The Scots-Irish culture is hard to kill, and provides the backbone of the modern conservative movement which is contrasted by centuries of murder ballads which went from being set in Durham to Knoxville. The Scots-Irish migrated across a huge area, mixing with the Cavaliers, a highly distinct honor culture in much of the Upper South. They started largely in Western Pennsylvania, went down the spine of the Appalachians to Georgia, and then west to Texas, Kansas, and even Oregon alongside most of the Lower Midwest. For a frame of reference: there are more Americans of Scots-Irish ancestry than there are African Americans, more people than nearly any nation in Europe.
For a brief example of modern influences of these ancestral cultures, Yankee-derived Americans tend to see the role of government as an active good to push their moral code. This is derived from their theocratic structure. In the Middle States, people like the Quakers and Scots-Irish believe the role of government is to further the individual as much as possible. Meanwhile, Cavalier descendants in the South see the role of the government as maintaining the traditional values and social structure of society. These beliefs started with fairly small British Early Modern cultures that transmuted into world-changing massive peoples who span continents. The world is quite strange isn’t it.
Ethnic Ties
Ethnicity in America is multifaceted, as the nation was formed fairly recently by settlers and slaves from elsewhere. It isn’t as straightforward as in nations like England or China, which had a certain people in a certain land for a long period of time. This gets to deep questions about America’s identity which have been argued for all of our history. However, there are multiple layers to this. Firstly, that ethnicity in America is still very real. Italian, German, Japanese, French, and African Americans are all immediately recognizable to a sufficiently skilled anthropologist, due to various telltale traits in almost all of their behaviors. Thomas Sowell’s book Ethnic America does a great job of examining how different sub-ethnicities of Americans have different histories informed by their home countries, occupations, skill levels, and other factors. This article won’t detail these, but rather examine regions of America where these ethnic differences become dominant and impossible to ignore, in order to understand them.
America’s genetics have in recent years been explored by a multitude of studies. I arrived at similar numbers before the genetic data came out by combining census results, migration statistics, and surname analysis. America is about three quarters European ancestry, even though non-Hispanic White Americans are quoted at less than sixty percent in the current (perhaps false) official statistics, given that two thirds of Hispanic American ancestry is of European origin. After Whites, Africans are about ten percent of America’s genetics, while all Asians constitute six percent. Ancestry from the British Isles is about one third of America’s total ancestry, with descendants from the United Kingdom being a majority among the non-Hispanic White population. German and a little bit of French make up fifteen percent of American ancestry, with a similar number of Spanish descendants.
There are a few regions of America where these ethnic identities have become prominent enough to overpower other variables. One of which is the South-West and Miami, which have in many ways become extensions of Latin America. Hispanics make up forty percent of both California and Texas’ population. This is both a very old and new thing. The first European settlers in this region were Spanish, but settled very lightly with only a few thousand people at most. The recent wave of Spanish speakers that has overtaken the South-West in the last forty years is causing one of the most rapid demographic shifts in human history.
The intensity of this demographic shift is paralleled only by the rapid rise of the European populations over the Native Americans in the 1800s. It’s hard to speak of the long-term consequences of the recent enormous migrations from the Third World to America, given that they have occurred within the last couple generations, which is not long enough to spot any anthropological trends. Perhaps they will integrate into American society, perhaps they will not. Maybe we will see mass deportations, or the replacement of the local populations. It is likely that the countryside will continue to outreproduce the cities, which will become “behavioral sinks”—a term coined by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe the collapse of social behavior that occurs when a population is subjected to extreme overcrowding, rapidly giving way to full population collapse—a significantly more common trend than people think. However the future is yet to be decided, and is in our hands.
Another ethnic region is the Northern Plains, in which the British cultures were overtaken by Germans and Scandinavians. German Americans are one of the largest demographic groups in America, being the second largest European ethnicity after the English. German ancestry is prominent in a region stretching from Pennsylvania to Oregon, while comprising the vast majority of the population in the Northern Great Plains in states like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. The Scandinavians populated the Dakotas and Minnesota by the Northern railroad, as Anglos didn’t want to live in the cold climate. The Northern plains have produced the highest human development statistics in America since the 20th century, similar to their Nordic home countries alongside cultural traits of social conservatism, economic productivity, relatively socialist politics, and the smothering Jante’s law of social conformity.
The final regions of America where you cannot separate ethnic identities from regional are the Catholic North-East and French Louisiana. Later Catholic immigrants like the Italians and Irish, but also Poles and French Canadians, migrated to the North-Eastern core of the American North-East, demographically taking over the region. You can see radical shifts in the trajectories of cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia when this occurred. The importance of Catholic migrants varied across the entire Rust Belt, and at times the whole continent. The Irish, who ultimately derive from a Celtic warrior culture, took over governments and institutions, like my ancestors who served in the police for five generations. The Italians worked as low-skill labor, coming over fifty years after the Irish around 1900. They worked themselves up through the corporate system to a higher income and social class than the Irish, with whom they mixed heavily.
The Catholic influence on the North-East made an indelible mark on the region, where local people are still very aware of White ethnic differences, to a degree that often shocks people in the rest of the country. Catholics often took over local governments and public-facing institutions, to the point that it’s easy to forget that in most of the North-East Anglos are still demographically predominant. Until recently Protestant Anglos also ran much of the economic and political power, leading to them culturally assimilate the Catholics. Throw on top of this massive recent migration from the Third World and the managerial-induced behavioral sink that turned against their own populations. In places like New Jersey, you can see many subcultures in a tiny area, from Irish to Black, Latinos, rural Anglos, upperclass WASPs, Indians, and many more. It gives the North-East a hard, cynical edge, but also a toughness not seen in the rest of the country.
A final culture that acts as a microcosm of all the American cultures is French Lousiania. It was established by French Canadians from modern Nova Scotia, who were evicted by the English in the War of Austrian Succession. They were from Poitou on the west coast of France originally, unlike the Quebecois from Normandy and Brittany. They sailed along the entire North American shore, being rejected by English settlers until they picked subtropical Louisiana where Acadian became Cajun. French Louisiana exists as the hollow shell of a greater French Canada that stretched to the Rockies, Arctic, Pittsburgh, and Texas before the Anglo conquest. Louisiana was the Blackest place in America during the colonial period, and is better seen as an extension of the French Caribbean, like Haiti, that was enveloped by another Caribbean-derived culture: the Deep South. Here are two highly specific European societies who generated their reactions to a similar region and climate. Both are distinctly American, but also profoundly different in many ways upon closer inspection.
Perhaps this is the story of America as a whole, of foreign peoples from different places wrestling, sometimes winning, sometimes losing against the land. However, in the process, they created a land unmistakably and distinctly their own.