Secession’s Magic Numbers, Part One

 

A serial review of books numbering the States after a dissolution of the Union.

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard; ISBN: 978-0-14-312202-9, Penguin, September 25, 2012, 384 pages.

American Nations is simply the most brilliant book I have ever read on American history. Almost every page is compact with some idea that overthrows “what every schoolboy knows,” and like every original and seminal book, it flows from a single powerful idea – in Woodard’s case, the idea that an American Union never existed. There are no “mystic chords of memory” swelling the chorus of Union except in the bombast of Lincoln’s rhetoric; there is no happily jiggered tumult of democracy pace Howard Zinn, where everyone eventually votes to slice off his chunk of the commonwealth; there is no “melting pot”; no “American exceptionalism”; no “propositional nation.” Woodard states at the outset:

There isn’t and never has been one America, but rather several Americas. (p2)]]

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