United States

Even more intriguing is the appearance of a series of essentially 20th-century regions. Southern California is the largest and perhaps the most distinctive region, and its special culture has attracted large numbers of immigrants to the state. Similar trends are visible in southern Florida; in Texas, whose mystique has captured the national imagination; and to a certain degree in the more ebullient regions of New Mexico and Arizona as well. At the metropolitan level, it is difficult to believe that such distinctive cities as San Francisco, Las Vegas, Dallas, Tucson, and Seattle have become like all other American cities. A detailed examination, however, would show significant if sometimes subtle interregional differences in terms of language, religion, diet, folklore, folk architecture and handicrafts, political behaviour, social etiquette, and a number of other cultural categories.

The Las Vegas Strip at night, 2001.© Andrew Zarivny/Shutterstock.com

The hierarchy of culture areas

A multitiered hierarchy of culture areas might be postulated for the United States; but the most interesting levels are, first, the nation as a whole and, second, the five to 10 large subnational regions, each embracing several states or major portions thereof. There is a remarkably close coincidence between the political United States and the cultural United States. Crossing into Mexico, the traveler passes across a cultural chasm. If the contrasts are less dramatic between the two sides of the U.S.-Canadian boundary, they are nonetheless real, especially to the Canadian. Erosion of the cultural barrier has been largely limited to the area that stretches from northern New York state to Aroostook county, Maine. There, a vigorous demographic and cultural immigration by French-Canadians has gone far toward eradicating international differences.

While the international boundaries act as a cultural container, the interstate boundaries are curiously irrelevant. Even when the state had a strong autonomous early existence—as happened with Massachusetts, Virginia, or Pennsylvania—subsequent economic and political forces have tended to wash away such initial identities. Actually, it could be argued that the political divisions of the 48 conterminous states are anachronistic in the context of contemporary socioeconomic and cultural forces. Partially convincing cases might be built for equating Utah and Texas with their respective culture areas because of exceptional historical and physical circumstances, or perhaps Oklahoma, given its very late European occupation and its dubious distinction as the territory to which exiled Indian tribes of the East were relegated. In most instances, however, the states either contain two or more distinctly different culture and political areas or fragments thereof or are part of a much larger single culture area. Thus sharp North–South dichotomies characterize California, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Florida, while Tennessee advertises that there are really three Tennessees. In Virginia the opposing cultural forces were so strong that actual fission took place in 1863 (with the admission to the Union of West Virginia) along one of those rare interstate boundaries that approximate a genuine cultural divide.

Much remains to be learned about the cause and effect relations between economic and culture areas in the United States. If the South or New England could at one time be correlated with a specific economic system, this is no longer easy to do. Cultural systems appear to respond more slowly to agents of change than do economic or urban systems. Thus the Manufacturing Belt, a core region for many social and economic activities, now spans parts of four traditional culture areas—New England, the Midland, the Midwest, and the northern fringes of the South. The great urban sprawl, from southern Maine to central Virginia, blithely ignores the cultural slopes that are still visible in its more rural tracts.

The cultural hearths