How would the USA fragment?

By Phil Gyford

There was some press not long ago about a Russian professor predicting the break-up of America in 2010. Kevin Kelly has a good piece on this and some other past predictions of a fragmentation of the USA and a few people on this forum make their own versions of varying degrees of seriousness.


Here’s the map from the Wall Street Journal article showing Igor Panarin’s prediction:

Kevin Kelly also includes a map from Joel Garreau’s 1981 book The Nine Nations of North America (more on Wikipedia):

I wondered about the different ways one could use to predict how the USA might fragment — if it was going to go where would the fault lines be? I headed over to the excellent Strange Maps site and found a few ideas.

First, this post shows a map from the Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy website which colours American counties in according to whether they call soft drinks “pop”, “soda” or something else:

It’s quite close to that first map by Panarin above.

Then we have this post which uses a map created by Matthew White in 1996 from his Surreal Histories site which looks at different versions of America. The map below answers the question “What would America have looked like if every separatist movement in US and Canadian history had succeeded?”

Next there’s a post with a map showing the “united countries of baseball”, based on the locations of supporters of each baseball team. You can download desktop wallpaper of the map from the official MLB United Countries of Baseball site:

Another idea would be to base regions of the country on where and how evolution is taught. The map used comes from the Science Against Evolution site although it was originallypublished in Scientific American in 2002

Finally there are election maps with these maps from the 2008 Presidential election perhaps the best known.