There is no more fascinating question about North Americans than whether our civilization is unitary or plural. In 1793 the geographer Jedediah Morse suggested that &dquo;The American Republic consists of three grand divisions, denominated the Northern, or more properly Eastern, Middle, and Southern States&dquo; (Morse, 1793: 1). But, forty years later, Alexis de Tocqueville (1835-1840) dwelt on the &dquo;great degree of likeness&dquo; in all the former British colonies. His Democracy In America noted two branches of American life-a northern and a southern-but appraised a unitary civilization. If Tocqueville were right, then there had been common cause and pattern in the North American divergence from Europe. If so, then what was the cause, what were the common patterns, and what was the balance between the regional and the North American experience,.' i Although these questions are geographical as much as they are historical or political, historical geographers have hesitated to broach them directly. For this there are good reasons. A few individuals aside, professional historical geography in North America is barely a generation old. The principal pioneers, Ralph Brown at Minnesota (1943, 1948) and Andrew Clark at Wisconsin (1959, 1968), established the subject as a secure branch of North American geography; but, although Clark often talked and even wrote about comparative opportunities, neither of them left a body of general ideas. The subject was launched by methodology rather then by theory, while the theory produced by the abstract and geometrical geography of the 1960s seemed and and irrelevant to geographers whose interests were essentially humanistic. Historical geographers, therefore, have not had a clear point of theoretical attachment. Our work is heavily archival and empirical and has been preoccupied with the factors that have differentiated particular areas. Moreover, we are not very numerous and generally we work alone. If there are scholarly advantages in a &dquo;critical mass,&dquo;historical geography hardly provides them. Typically, we find that scholars outside geography offer the most informed comment on. our particular researches. Our own literature is not internally argumentative, except at a methodological level. And yet our scattered literature, grown out of a common geographical interest in man and land, is more connected than it seems and has generalizing implications that we have not quite seized. In this article I will suggest that, in sum, it offers a coherent, even tolerably comprehensive interpretation of Euro-