America's Lost Tribe: The Puritans & Greater Appalachia's Role In Their Disappearance

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the fascinating world of America's forgotten cultural groups, focusing on the Puritans and their lasting impact on modern American society. This eye-opening discussion explores:

* The surprising truth about Puritan culture and its evolution

* How Puritan values merged with Backwoods culture to survive

* The unexpected connection between Puritan ethics and modern parenting styles

* Why certain cultural groups thrived while others faded away

* The impact of Catholic immigration on America's cultural landscape

* Insights into raising children with a "clan-based" mentality

* How historical cultural differences still influence modern American society

Whether you're a history buff, a parent looking for unique perspectives, or just curious about America's cultural roots, this video offers valuable insights into the forces that shaped our nation.​

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I am

excited to be here with you today. This will be our second episode going over some of the concepts, what we think they got right, and what we think they got wrong of the book.

Simone Collins: American Nations by Colin Woodard, which was inspired by one of our favorite books of all time, Albion Seed by David Hackett Fisher.

Malcolm Collins: And this divides America into a 11 cultural groups. And I will put a map on screen here so you can see it. And in the last episode we did on this, which you can check out one of the core things I think he got wrong is he thought that the Puritan cultural group in the Northeastern United States ended up being the core mountain head.

Of current Yankee culture or the northeastern coastal culture in the United States, where we argue this is fundamentally wrongheaded that that culture actually stems from Catholicism which for a long time made up the majority population in these regions after the immigration waves started so [00:01:00] even though.

Just to briefly cover some concepts from the last one that a lot of people are unfamiliar with Catholics at the time of America's founding were an incredibly small part of the colonies. They were like 1. 5%. Even in the quote unquote Catholic colony. They were a very small minority around 10%. That was Maryland.

So they just were not a big cultural force in America. Until the Irish, Italian, and now Hispanic immigration waves, which led to the Catholic population becoming the predominant cultural wellspring of three of the American cultural groups, specifically. In the last episode, we focused a lot on how they were the wellspring of the

Yankee cultural group, but they are also the wellspring of the El Norte cultural group, which is the Hispanic cultural group in the, in the center.

And the far left cultural group that is on the west coast. And if I put a map here of American by relig America's districts by primary religious affiliation, you will see there is a huge overlap with all the blue strongholds and where the Catholics were [00:02:00] settling. So now we want to go, or at least these specific blue strongholds, i.

e. Yankeedom and Far Leftem the, the far west coast of the United States. Now what we want to do is go into a question this brings up. And it's a very interesting question if you've read LBNC, is, okay, these are the four cultures that form the foundation of America.

Where did they go? Right?

Where did the Quakers go? Where did the Puritans go? Where did the Where did the Cavaliers go? Because the Backwoods people, which I'm descended from, the greater We know where they

Simone Collins: are. They're right where you think they are.

Malcolm Collins: We will, in this episode, talk about this culture. And it's background, but I think a lot of people are a bit mystified about what happened to the three other, it's kind of cool in American history, by the way, if you, if you like study it, it's like the lost tribes, it's like, well, they're really unique founding groups in the country.

Where did they go? How did they end up actually influencing the cultures that came [00:03:00] downstream of them? And a big answer here is. They mostly died out.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: However it was the, the, well, a separate episode on how the Quakers died out, because that's a very interesting story in and of itself. But today we're going to talk about the Puritans what they broadly stood for, how one group of the Puritans, or I'd say the Calvinist settlers in early America because there were two big groups here, which I think is really undersold.

The Backwoods people, the Backwoods group, the greater Appalachian group was heavily related to the Puritan group. They were also a Calvinist group. They generally got along with the Puritan group and they ended up, I actually, here's a great example of how well they got along with the Puritan group. So there was something called the Paxton boys uprising.

And in it because the Quakers always trying to bureaucratically control everything, we're giving their districts like half the vote that the, that the Quaker districts had the, the more central [00:04:00] urban districts had and they also had created a situation in which the Indians were constantly attacking and killing these people.

And they were like we don't really care, I guess, is the thing. I mean, talk about other, there's so much of like American lore, which is just like myth stories. So it was actually around this, the time of the Paxton Boys, like leading up to this, that the famous giving Indians smallpox infected blankets thing came from.

And people are like, oh, oh, that's so horrible. How could anyone have done that? And it's like, you know, they had just. Killed over 2, 000 settlers and were besieging a settlement and that was the context Excuse me They had been butchering children like what like they were trying to save a settlement that was under siege This is like a Alamo situation here people like, is it bad, like by modern warfare standards?

Yeah. If you are behind the walls of a city and you know, a group just butchered like the [00:05:00] two cities next to you and killed all the women and children. And you've got your family there. Are you not going to try everything you can think of to try to protect yourself? Because you have sent requests to the local Pennsylvania government, but it's run by Quakers and Quakers are pacifists.

Simone Collins: I mean, yeah, I kind of have like. With all things in life right now a f**k around and find out attitude. Like, I mean, also you siege a town, they're going to, they're going to try some stuff, like maybe they didn't expect biological warfare. Does that mean it's unfair? I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is actually a really interesting thing about the backwoods people.

So we're going to talk about where they came from, but also a really interesting thing about them culturally, because they had a relationship with the Indians that was both incredibly. more brutal than any of the other founding American cultural groups. Yeah, I

Simone Collins: think many American cultural groups saw them as equal to the Native American, the indigenous populations, because they were equally brutal in some of [00:06:00] their behaviors vis a vis other groups.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so, so we'll get to that. But first it's just like, let's talk about where they came from more broadly. Mm-Hmm. . So they were the second wave of immigrants into the United States. So you can really say the first wave of people who felt like European immigrants in America.

Simone Collins: I don