The Emergence of Regional Cultures in the United States

This paper recovers the cultural geography of the United States from first-name patterns in census data spanning 1850 to 1930. Using unsupervised clustering of county-level name distributions, we identify spatially coherent cultural regions that align with historically recognized settlement patterns and remain stable across eight decades of economic and institutional change. The deepest division separates North from South, but finer groupings (New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Appalachia, the Deep South) emerge as nested subregions. Formal tests confirm that the recovered clusters are spatially contiguous, temporally persistent, and robust to resampling. The findings bear on whether liberal institutions require cultural homogeneity, whether cultural pluralism is a source of resilience or fragility, and how the imprint of early settlement shapes the practice of self-governance.