How the ‘Empty Quarter’ Became America’s Great Success Story
30th September 2021
In 1981, Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau attempted to understand the many subcultures of America by examining in detail the differences between different states. He came away unsatisfied, and the ultimate result of this dissatisfaction was an influential book, The Nine Nations of North America. In it, he ignored these often-arbitrary state boundaries and divided America into nine regional “nations” that he argued corresponded more with cultural, socio-economic and demographic realities.
One of his nine “nations” of American he named The Empty Quarter.
Centered around the Rocky Mountains it extended out into adjacent and culturally and demographically similar territory. Garreau’s book was a minor sensation and, directly or indirectly, it launched several similar efforts over the ensuing decades — most recently Colin Woodard’s 2020 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Woodard’s “Far West” nation in his book encompassed the core states of Garreau’s Empty Quarter while tweaking it with some of his own additions.