The Four Regions We’re Exploring Right Now
We begin by telling the stories of four foundational American regions—places where culture, memory, and identity endured even as history battered the people who carried them.
Each region tells a different American story.
Together, they explain much of how the country thinks, votes, argues, celebrates, and survives.
Appalachia — The Scots-Irish Heartland
Appalachia is a land of ridges and hollers, front porches and church pews, ballads and banjos.
Its people trace their roots to Scots-Irish borderlanders who fled persecution, crossed the Atlantic, and settled the hardest terrain they could find—places where self-reliance wasn’t a philosophy, it was survival.
This is a culture shaped by:
Scottish Highlands clan memory and family honor
suspicion of distant authority
deep faith and oral tradition
music born in kitchens and coal camps
an intense attachment to place
To understand Appalachia is to understand why autonomy matters, why land matters, and why people who feel forgotten rarely forget.
Lakota Territories — A Sovereign People
The Lakota story is written into the plains, the sky, and the seasons.
It is a culture grounded in ceremony, kinship, and responsibility to future generations—where history is remembered not through books alone, but through story, song, and ritual.
Lakota life has been shaped by:
a spiritual relationship to land and animals
communal decision-making and oral law
ceremonies tied to the sun, the seasons, and continuity
the trauma of forced removal and broken treaties
a fierce commitment to sovereignty and survival
To understand the Lakota is to understand a people who never stopped being who they were, even when everything around them was taken.
The Mississippi Delta — Where America Found Its Voice
The Mississippi Delta is flat, fertile, and heavy with memory.
It is the birthplace of the Blues—music born from work songs, sorrow, faith, humor, and defiance—and a cultural engine that shaped jazz, rock, gospel, and hip-hop.
Delta culture is defined by:
foodways rooted in survival and celebration
churches that doubled as schools and organizing centers
music that told truths politics couldn’t
deep ties to land, even after land was lost
a legacy of movement—north, south, and back again
The Delta teaches us how culture carries people through injustice—and how art becomes a form of record-keeping when history refuses to listen.
South Texas — A Borderland Culture
South Texas is a borderland in every sense: geographic, cultural, and historical.
Its people—Tejanos—have lived under Aztec, Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and American rule, often without ever moving.
This is a culture shaped by:
family networks that stretch across borders
Catholicism and communal celebration
ranching, vaquero traditions, and labor pride
Spanish and English living side by side
resilience in the face of political neglect
South Texas culture is not recent immigration—it is deep time. To understand it is to understand America as a place where identity doesn’t fit neatly into boxes.
Where This Is Going
These four regions are the beginning—not the end.
This American Mosaic is a long-term project to understand the country as it actually is: a nation shaped by many peoples, arriving in different waves, carrying distinct cultures, faiths, foods, memories, and relationships to power.
From the Puritans to the Puerto Ricans, the French Huguenots to the Filipinos, and the Enslaved Africans to the Armenians—America has never been one story.
It has always been many.
Over time, we will explore these groups as lived cultures, not abstractions:
how they arrived, what they brought with them, what they lost, how they adapted, and how those experiences still shape how communities work, vote, worship, celebrate, and argue today.
Because America doesn’t move forward for another 250 years by flattening its differences. It moves forward by understanding them.
One people.
One place.
One story at a time.
Michael’s passion for understanding the peoples of America started with his own family tree.
Michael became passionate about the stories of Americans while researching his ancestry. The histories of Michael’s ancestors began predominately in Scotland. His forebears immigrated to Appalachia during the Scottish Clearances of the 1700s. After the Homestead Acts, Michael’s great-great-grandparents settled into Missouri where they intermarried with Germans, English, and a Swede.
