00:00 American Nations argues that the United States has always been a divided nation with different regional cultures that still impact American culture and politics today.

04:21 The settlement groups that came to the New World after the English Civil War were rivals and enemies from the beginning, with fundamental characteristics of their worldview and political goals still impacting American culture and politics today.

08:58 The regional cultures in the United States have proven to be durable and resistant to homogenization, despite factors such as mass immigration and mass media, due to self-sorting and self-selection of immigrants based on cultural and political preferences.

13:43 The cultural characteristics of different regions in the United States affected immigration patterns and increased the differences between the regions, rather than homogenizing the country.

17:56 The cultural geographer Wilber Zelinski's doctrine of first effective settlement explains how the first group of settler colonizers in a region have an outsized influence on the future trajectory of that society, formatting the cultural "hard drive" and laying down the dominant culture that future generations have to deal with.

22:27 The process of determining the first effective settlement group in each county involves analyzing various sources such as genealogies, settlement histories, town histories, cemeteries, churches, election results, and census data, with the goal of identifying the dominant culture that shaped the region.

26:56 The settlement patterns in the United States, as reflected in dialect maps and cultural regions, correlate with the pace of settlement and the influence of external factors such as railroads and industrial resources, particularly in the interior west, where the environmental factors overwhelmed the ethnographic ones.

31:27 The new book "Union" explores the regional tensions and polarizations in the United States, and raises concerns about the country's ability to hold together in the face of major shocks.

36:19 The book "Union" explores the creation and fight over the story of United States nationhood, which was an artificial one that had to be false because the country lacked shared origins, and examines the ongoing battle between the civic national tradition and the ethno national one, which still poses dangerous vulnerabilities to the country's unity.

40:50 The process of creating a national story is always artificial, as it involves choosing what to emphasize and what to leave out, but it is necessary for individuals and social groups to have stories of belonging and purpose; therefore, it is important for us to understand the history of our own story and the fight over it in order to create a constructive story that is built on our existing tradition but improved and retooled for the 21st century.

45:13 Understanding the artificial nature of the national story and the discontinuity between different versions of it is crucial for creating a civic national story that is inclusive, inspiring, and rooted in the core founding ideals of the United States.