These United Regions

Colin Woodard looks at how the eleven regional "nations" of North America that he laid out in his book, American Nations:A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America relate to today's politics in Tufts Magazine (h/t Kaye).  He describes the historical roots of each region and how those historical traits affect relations in group and between groups.  Here is the description of the Midlands, where my home county is on the borderland with Greater Appalachia:

America’s great swing region was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down government intervention.

That seems pretty realistic, although the area is smaller than I would expect.  I personally would lump Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota in there, too, but I think the greater Liberalism in those regions cause Woodard to lump them in with New England.  So what seems to be the driving force of the American culture?  Jim Webb's Scots-Irish:

More recently, researchers have begun to probe beyond state boundaries to distinguish among different cultural streams. Robert Baller of the University of Iowa and two colleagues looked at late-twentieth-century white male “argument-related” homicide rates, comparing those in counties that, in 1850, were dominated by Scots-Irish settlers with those in other parts of the “Old South.” In other words, they teased out the rates at which white men killed each other in feuds and compared those for Greater Appalachia with those for Deep South and Tidewater. The result: Appalachian areas had significantly higher homicide rates than their lowland neighbors—“findings [that] are supportive of theoretical claims about the role of herding as the ecological underpinning of a code of honor.”
Another researcher, Pauline Grosjean, an economist at Australia’s University of New South Wales, found strong statistical relationships between the presence of Scots-Irish settlers in the 1790 census and contemporary homicide rates, but only in “southern” areas “where the institutional environment was weak”—which is the case in almost the entirety of Greater Appalachia. She further noted that in areas where Scots-Irish were dominant, settlers of other ethnic origins—Dutch, French, and German—were also more violent, suggesting that they had acculturated to Appalachian norms.

American gun culture and violence compared to Europe seems to be rooted in the folks who tend to describe themselves as American when asked their national origin: