A conversation with Colin Woodard, Director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. Author of six books including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

"North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn’t confront or assimilate into an “American” or “Canadian” culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory."
"Listen to the southern conservatives talk about violence in America and you’d think New York City was as dangerous as Bakhmut on Ukraine’s eastern front. 
In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions to which Florida and Texas belong  have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute."            Colin Woodard