• A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.

Explores the meaning of the history of the Americas in relation to history in general, or so-called universal history. The problems and conflicts of the Iberian and Western worlds are analyzed as they pertain to the New World where they became the legacy inherited by North America and Latin America. The relationships between the Iberian and the Western world, as seen in their European and American manifestations, are seen as an expression of the relationship of the world in general to the West in particular, that is to say, the relationship of non-Western peoples, including the Iberians, to the so-called Western peoples.

A synthesis of the history of the entire hemisphere.

In THE AMERICAS, Fernadez-Armesto connects all the dots, explaining the astounding interconnectedness of this vast land mass, and demonstrating that the dominance of North over South is a very recent development in the scheme of things and by no means foreordained. Europeans first conceived of the hemisphere as a singl America, a single New World, and Armesto brings us full circle. He emphasizes the connectiosn and cross-pollinations - in trade, religion, agriculture, environmental factors, migration (including most importantly, the slave trade) and political ideas - that have bound the hemisphere over its history, from the earliest humans, through the colonial era, to the present.