Colin Woodard

“The Midlanders—a great many of them German speaking—carried their pluralistic culture into the Heartland, a place long since identified with neighborliness, family-centered…

— Colin Woodard

“I am a free Prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has…

— Colin Woodard

“The Inuit language has no difference between he or she, or between mankind and animal,” she adds. “They’re all equal.”5”

— Colin Woodard

“fear can be the most powerful of weapons.”

— Colin Woodard

“As you travel north across Ohio,” Ohio State University dean Harlan Hatcher wrote in 1945, “you feel that you have been transported…

— Colin Woodard

“Split by an increasingly militarized border, El Norte in some ways resembles Germany during the Cold War: two peoples with a common…

— Colin Woodard

“It began in 1784, when people in the western territories of North Carolina (now eastern Tennessee) became disgusted with Tidewater control. Their…

— Colin Woodard

“The Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by…

— Colin Woodard

“A little-known fact is that most American of icons, the open-range cattle industry, originated in El Norte and was based on Spanish…

— Colin Woodard

“Since 1877 the driving force of American politics hasn’t primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or…

— Colin Woodard

“A state is a sovereign political entity like the United Kingdom, Kenya, Panama, or New Zealand, eligible for membership in the United…

— Colin Woodard

“But what would cause Yankeedom eventually to be so loathed by the other nations was its desire—indeed, its mission—to impose its ways…

— Colin Woodard

“Japanese children were kept out of California classrooms as late as 1907 on the theory that they lacked the aptitude for higher learning.”

— Colin Woodard

“Salem and Portland were founded by New Englanders, the latter named by a native of Portland, Maine, after winning a coin toss…

— Colin Woodard

“The Borderlander’s combative culture has provided a large proportion of the nation’s military, from officers like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and Douglas…

— Colin Woodard

“From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South’s great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel,…

— Colin Woodard

“several hundred English lived on Tortuga, the westernmost part of the sprawling British Leeward Islands”

— Colin Woodard

“I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality.”

— Colin Woodard

“Most Americans know the Dutch founded what is now Greater New York City. Few realize that their influence is largely the reason…

— Colin Woodard

“The emigrants aboard the Mayflower of the West were typical. On arrival in eastern Ohio, they founded the town of Marietta, and…

— Colin Woodard

“These New England outposts quickly dotted the map of the Western Reserve, their names revealing the origins of their Connecticut founders: Bristol,…

— Colin Woodard