The Nine Nations of North America

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Book of the Week' After All These Years

Canada's national newspaper The National Post ran a four-part series on its "non-fiction book of the week" the first week of July 2017. And -- wait for it -- yup, it was "Nine Nations."

The 2016 Voting Map of the Nine Nations

The quadrennial University of Michigan election maps are out, and sure enough, they illuminate the state of the Nine Nations. Joel finds the sixth map, by county -- that includes the purple results as well as the blue and red -- the most interesting.

Where Each State's Immigrants Were Born

Fascinating decade-by-decade for 100 years maps of where each state's then-largest immigrant groups came from.

Most Embarrassing Popular Google Searches By State

What’s It About

Joel Garreau is a noted observer of what makes all the people of the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean tick.

Author of the best-selling, widely translated, Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

In the Nine Nations of North America, he is one of those rare analysts whose scope comfortably includes all the people from the Arctic Circle to Mexico, and from Hawaii to Newfoundland.

His insights have been embraced by a remarkable portion of the continent's business community – from the makers of automobiles to the sellers of over-the-counter medicines. He has seen some of the phrases he coined enter more than one language – "MexAmerica" to describe the American Southwest plus Northern Mexico, for example. His work also has become a cult item among the continent's marketers, broadcasters, reporters and political consultants.

In his spirited speaking presentations, which are illustrated by slides and punctuated by humor, Garreau shares up-to-the-minute research on the wildly different behaviors of people in the varying parts of our continent. He shows that no matter what the lines on our maps may say, the people of this dauntingly complex continent are really behaving as if they were parts of nine separate civilizations or economies.

Garreau's work destroys once and for all the notion that the airports and interstates and the celebrated franchised hamburgers have made North Americans all one and the same, as bland and homogenous as tapioca pudding. Instead, he shows that as power and money and influence is dispersed throughout the continent, attitudes shift dramatically, and understanding the differences in our cultures and values become crucial for decisions makers.

This is why Garreau has been a regular contributor to the International Forum of the University of Pennsylvania's innovative Wharton Business School, briefing top executives from Korea to Sweden. He has appeared on over one thousand television and radio programs, including "Good Morning America," "Today," "The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather," "the NBC Nightly News," "ABC World News With Peter Jennings," National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," Cable News Network, The Jesse Jackson Show and The Larry King Show.

Joel Garreau is a senior writer for The Washington Post in Washington DC, president of his company, The Garreau Group, and a member of the scenario-planning consortium Global Business Network. He writes and consults from his Virginia home, which he shares with his wife and two daughters.

Chapters

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"Preface"

THIS ALL STARTED as a kind of private craziness.A small band of newspaper people who spent their time on the road across America, reporting on it for the Washington Post, started getting used to a certain question from me, their desk-bound editor. What, I wanted to know, was it like wherever they found themselves?

Chapter Two - "The Nine Nations"

FORGET the pious wisdom you've been handed about North America.

Forget about the borders dividing the United States, Canada, and Mexico, those pale barriers so thoroughly porous to money, immigrants, and ideas.

Forget the bilge you were taught in sixth-grade geography about East and West, North and South, faint echoes of glorious pasts that never really existed save in sanitized textbooks.

Chapter Three - "New England"

EAST OF THE GREEN MOUNTAINS, under a bridge that carries the main street of the town of Randolph, Vermont, over the Third Branch of the White River, lies a small mill.

With the words SARGENT ROUNDY CORPORATION fading on its smokestack, the place might seem to be abandoned. There are many deserted factories in this beautiful land, much of whose industry has seen hard times for a century.

Chapter Four - "The Foundry"

"Oh-ho say can you see . . ."

Dull green with yellow tips, the hefty cranes up on towers cluster, sporting the markings of Bethlehem Steel. Amid them, incongruously, are nestled the white-tipped black yardarms of a three-masted sailing ship, the U.S.S. Constellation.

Radical Evolution

Edge City: Life on the New Frontier

Nine Nations New Stuff

The Nine Nations of North America New Stuff

Book of the Week' After All These Years

Canada's national newspaper The National Post ran a four-part series on its "non-fiction book of the week" the first week of July 2017. And -- wait for it -- yup, it was "Nine Nations."

The 2016 Voting Map of the Nine Nations

Where Each State's Immigrants Were Born

Fascinating decade-by-decade for 100 years maps of where each state's then-largest immigrant groups came from.

Most Embarrassing Popular Google Searches By State

A Revisit in The New York Times

The New York Times, in "Room for Debate," publishes their package asking how the world's boundaries are being redrawn. One guy gives Siberia to China. Another draws the "real" Kurdistan. And oh yes, here is Joel's revisit of "The Nine Nations of North America," after all these years. It's amazing how durable have been these boundaries of culture and values.

Mapping Friendly, Conventional, Relaxed, Creative, Etc.

This is a painstaking and painfully earnest study of psychological variables and how they cluster regionally.

The Nine Nations Map of the 2012 Election

Mark Newman -- who studies complex systems at the University of Michigan -- produces some of the coolest electoral cartographs Joel knows. Newman morphs the maps to more accurately reflect population size and similar. Here are his maps for the 2012 election. The Nine Nations boundaries pop pretty nicely.

The 2012 Election

Joel Kotkin -- part of the original cabal of journalists who created the Nine Nations vision -- writes that the reason Ohio mattered so much becomes clear from a Nine Nations perspective.

The New Demographics of Smart Phones

The newest vexing conundrum: Blackberry or iPhone or Droid? Well, which smart phone you pick may depend on whether you are skinny, or Democrat, or like to live far from your neighbors.

The Cell Phone Nations of the U.S.

Researchers at MIT Senseable City Lab, AT&T; Labs-Research and IBM Research are revealing new research that redefines regional boundaries in the United States, using patterns of social connectedness across the country derived from anonymous and aggregated cell phone data.