The Nine Nations of North America - Definition

The Nine Nations of North America was a book written in 1981 by Joel Garreau. According to the book, North America can be divided into nine regions, or "nations", which have distinctive economic and cultural features. The regions do not always follow conventional national and state boundaries. The nine "nations" in his book are:

• New England (also called New Britain or Atlantica) - an expanded version including not only Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut (although omitting the Connecticut suburbs of New York City), but also the Canadian Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

• The Foundry - the then-declining industrial areas of the northeastern United States stretching from New York City to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and including Chicago, Illinois as well as industrial southern Ontario centering on Toronto, Ontario.

• Dixie - the traditional Confederate States of America, which are today the southern and southeastern U.S. states, centered on Atlanta, Georgia, and including most of eastern Texas to Austin. Garreau's "Dixie" also includes Kentucky, which never officially joined the Confederacy, and southern portions of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Finally, his "Dixie" includes most of Florida as far south as the city of Fort Myers.

• The Breadbasket - the Midwest states and part of the Prairie provinces: Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, western Missouri, parts of Illinois and Indiana, and northern Texas as well as some of 'near-North' Ontario, and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with its "capital" as Kansas City, Missouri.

• The Islands - the Miami/Fort Lauderdale portion of southern Florida, the Caribbean islands, and parts of Venezuela.

• Mexamerica - the southern and Central Valley portions of California as well as Arizona, New Mexico and all of Mexico, centered on either Los Angeles or Mexico City (depending on whom you ask), which are primarily Spanish-speaking.

• Ecotopia - the Pacific Northwest coast west of the Cascade Range stretching from Alaska in the north to coastal areas of British Columbia, down through Washington state, Oregon and into California just south of San Francisco.

• The Empty Quarter - most of Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Denver, Colorado, as well as the eastern portions of Oregon, California, Washington, all of Alberta and Northern Canada, and British Columbia east of the Coast Ranges.

• Quebec - the primarily French-speaking province of Canada, whose provincial government already calls itself the Quebec National Assembly, and which has run referenda on secession in 1980 and 1995, in both of which the secessionists lost narrowly.

Garreau also discussed several areas that he termed "aberrations":

• Washington, D.C. and its surrounding area, specifically referring to the area "inside the Beltway".
• Manhattan south of Harlem (he placed Harlem firmly within The Foundry).
• Hawaii, which he considered an Asian aberration as much as a North American aberration.

External links

• The Nine Nations of North America (http://www.garreau.com/nnna.html)
• Garreau's original map and detailed statistics (http://www.harpercollege.edu/~mhealy/g101ilec/namer/nac/nacnine/na9intro/nacninfr.htm)
• Garreau's analysis summarized (http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/18)