Look at a map of the United States and think about the country’s various regions. Where does Pennsylvania belong? The Northeast? Appalachia? The mid-Atlantic?
Colin Woodard, director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University and an expert on North American regions, says it’s actually at the crossroads of three, and you probably couldn’t guess the names of these areas.
Woodard defines 11 distinct regional cultures in his book American Nations. Studying and witnessing the complicated cultural and political battles in the Balkans in college made him want to understand the fissures in the United States.
His research led him to the work of the now-deceased Penn State cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky, whose doctrine of “first effective settlement” became the backbone of Woodard’s quest to define the United States’ regional cultures.
The three regions Woodard places Pennsylvania in are “Greater Appalachia,” “Yankeedom,” and “Midlands” — a massive area that includes roughly 82% of the state’s population.
The Keystone State isn’t alone in being divided between several of Woodard’s regions — only 15 states are squarely within a single cultural zone — but he claims Pennsylvania as the origin point of two of the country’s “nations,” a distinction held by no other state.
PA Local recently spoke with Woodard about why Pennsylvania falls into multiple “American nations,” how William Penn’s philosophy played a role in the birth of two of them, and where cultural influences overlap.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Could you explain how you came up with this system?
Colin Woodard: My question was, “Why is the country divided?” And the reason is that we’re really a federation of these stateless nations, if you will — these regional cultures that tie back to the differences between the rival colonial projects that had formed on the eastern and southwestern rims of what’s now the United States.
Academically, this is based on the work of a cultural geographer named Wilbur Zelinsky, who was asking, “How do new cultures form?” His explanation … is that the first group of colonizers or settlers who managed to create a self-perpetuating society will have an outsized influence over the future trajectory and characteristics of that society. People can disappear — it’s the sort of formatting of the cultural hard drive that’s the essence of it.
I was trying to track, therefore, who were the first effective settlers of each county as you moved across the colonization of the continent by these rival projects and then extirpation of control by the Indigenous people who are already there.
Many other academics have used different ways to distinguish regions, and I brought everything to bear where we didn’t know who the first effective settlers were to act as proxies to figure out who they were.
Pennsylvania is split into three regions under your model: Greater Appalachia in the southwest corner, Yankeedom in the north along the New York border, and then Midlands, which covers pretty much everything else. What are the defining features of each of these regions?
The Midlands is [an] ethnic mosaic. The Quakers believed that people were inherently good. And one of the implications of that was a very open immigration policy. So from the very beginning, a much greater variety of people were welcome to come to Pennsylvania.
What’s really distinctive in the Midlands is that the identity model was that you could come, bring your culture and keep it — forever, if need be. It was not presumed to be some sort of dominant culture people needed to assimilate into. In other words, it was not a melting pot. It was an ethnic mosaic, a salad bowl, by design.
That Yankee strip in Pennsylvania is because Connecticut in its original charter had all the land in a Connecticut-wide strip to wherever the next ocean was … which cut across the northern part of Pennsylvania. It was actually a series of wars, they call them the Yankee-Pennamite Wars, between essentially Scots-Irish dominated settlers, the Pennamites, and the Yankees … who were battling it out over sovereignty and control. In the end, sovereignty would lay with Pennsylvania, but that strip was settled by New Englanders.
Yankees … it’s a melting pot. They’re people on a mission. The original Puritans thought they were tasked by God to create a more perfect Calvinist society on Earth. But the important thing was that they were supposed to do it as a group, and they’d be reported or punished as a group for how they did, and so the individual could mess things up, and everyone needed to be with the program. So, yes, immigrants, you can come here, but you have to become like us.
Then finally you have Greater Appalachia, which was also founded in Pennsylvania, because one of the biggest sources of immigrants in the early 18th century when the Quakers dominated the government in Pennsylvania … were people from the Lowlands of Scotland and English Marches, and especially Ulster Protestants.
As soon as they entered, they almost all went to the frontier, which at the time was southwestern Pennsylvania. In the Lowlands of Scotland and Ulster, these people had been intentionally deployed by Queen Elizabeth to Ulster to put down Irish indigenous resistance to British rule, and there in the backcountry of the United States, they were often treasured because they were backcountry people you could put out there to fight the resistance of the Indigenous people there whose land was being taken away.
The Scots-Irish stream down that kind of frontier zone, sticking to the highlands, creating a regional culture that extends all the way to the Texas Hill Country. It’s an enormous culture, but it got started in that corner of Pennsylvania. That culture is highly individualistic. [They believe] that nothing good can come of government and institutions, that they’re all creations by the powerful to try to exploit ordinary people, which was exactly their experience in Ulster and the Lowlands of Scotland. So there’s a strong emphasis on individual freedom and personal autonomy.
With Pennsylvania, how much did you have to dig to figure out some of these county identities? Was it one of the states where it was easier?
The Yankees are always the easiest, because they were obsessed in the 19th century with tracing their genealogies back to the old settlers — the Puritans if they could, or the Mayflower. They were a literate society and therefore produced in that time period detailed genealogies, and published them.
The Midlands is sort of a little bit less like that, but still in the same category. Pennsylvania, of course, was one of the very first places settled. And in general, this culture mapping is easier if the first effective settlers came a long time ago when people moved slowly, when it could take a generation to move from one county to the next county — where you basically had to walk.
It’s a pretty literate society, records survived, and people came there early on and moved slowly. It also helped that the Midlands seems to be a place where the culture, relative to others, prized rootedness. I think some of that may be the attitude of the German settlers who tended to build to last.
What do you think made Pennsylvania fertile ground to be the beginnings of two of these regions?
It’s because of William Penn and the vision of the Quakers and this holy experiment. Because they believed in “inner light,” and they were trying to create a utopian society, like the Puritans were — but their model was, “people are alright.” That there will be order and things will turn out alright, because humans are alright. We don't need to organize everything and have a grand plan. Let people come, and let it happen organically.
That meant that there was an open door for all sorts of people to come into that colony at a time when the other colonies had very strict ideas about who could come and who could enter the colony. So Pennsylvania was really unusual in that respect, and it led to the creation of this Midlands culture. But it also let open the door for this massive pulse in the 18th century of Scots-Irish.
When I first looked at your map before I understood what Midlands meant, I was skeptical about how much of the state it takes up. Because when I look at the Midlands zone in Pennsylvania, I see a lot of regional cultures that I think a lot of Pennsylvanians would define as pretty distinct from one another.
You zoom in beyond national culture, there’s a whole other overlay of smaller-level cultures and sub-regions and all the rest. But that’s true of every nation.
Maine, where I live, is part and parcel of the core New England part of Yankeedom, but you could write an entire book about the massive defining hostility of Maine to Massachusetts and the Puritans. And I did, it's called The Lobster Coast. In the 1650s, we were annexed by force by Massachusetts and treated as an external resource colony for 150 years, and that shaped our people. And yet … we’re part of a greater Yankee culture even if we dislike the metropole as much as we do.
I don’t disagree that it’s more complicated as you go under the overlay, but that’s just the nature of national cultures.
>>>READ MORE: Why Pennsylvanians care so dang much about regional names, borders
It stood out to me that Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is, was categorized as Midlands.
Yeah, it is. Controversially, among some. I was going back and forth in the archives with their longtime staff columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We had a funny series of columns about whether that was true or not: [him] arguing it’s the Paris of Appalachia, me arguing, nah, it’s Midlands. It’s a pretty funny back and forth.
Yeah, the debate over Pittsburgh’s regional identity is what made me want to ask about that. People ask: Is Pittsburgh the Midwest? Is it Northeast? Is it Appalachia?
Clearly, it’s right on the border, right? Westmoreland [County] is Greater Appalachia. So it’s right there.
The reason it’s so contested is it grew up around a federal fort. The first effective settlers were a bunch of soldiers, and then a community started forming at the edge of the fort. It’s right next to the Greater Appalachian zone, but it’s coded Midlands for a reason.
When the Whiskey Rebellion breaks out … The Pittsburgh militia was trying to stop the Appalachian settlers, and surrendered because they were too fierce. It wasn’t like Pittsburgh rose up to join the Whiskey Rebellion. Pittsburgh was seen as an alien place by the Appalachian settlers that needed to be brought to heel.
But there’s a reason it's contested, right? It’s not a slam dunk, because it’s right on a river system. It’s right where Appalachian and the Midlands butted up against each other. I’m not surprised it's one of the more difficult ones to code, but it’s correctly coded as Midlands. I’m standing by it.
On a similar note, I wanted to ask about these areas that are near the borders of these regions. How much cultural spillover do you see in some of these counties that are classified as one thing, but right next to the other?
Human life is messy. It’s never going to be a clean map.
What cultural geographers do, is they talk about cultures having a core, a domain, and a periphery. And in those terms, my map is showing the cores and domains of each of these regional cultures. New England and upstate New York, or maybe the Western Reserve of Ohio, are kind of the core of the Yankee New England culture, and the domain extends over Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota. It's still there … [but] it's not quite as … strong.
But there are peripheries all over the place that overlap. So yeah, around Pittsburgh, you'd have this Appalachian periphery extending over that whole area. The Midlands would have a periphery extending into Westmoreland and some of those other counties, and so on. More like multiple Venn diagrams, but it’s a weaker signal than the core of their domain.
This is the fourth installment in a series about Pennsylvania’s regions. Find the first piece here, the second here, and the third here. To make sure you don’t miss future installments, subscribe to our free, weekly PA Local newsletter.