It took me a long time to understand that there are different Americas.

Growing up in a suburb of Buffalo and part time here in Chautauqua County, I believed the America I grew up in was the America everybody experienced and that the only difference between people was economic in nature.

I started to see things differently when I began working at WKBW in Buffalo in the 1980’s. I invited everyone in the newsroom to a Christmas party at my house, including a black on-air news reporter.

He didn’t show up at my house in the suburbs on the night of the party although I thought I spotted him driving by my house at one point early in the evening.

The next day, when I asked him why he didn’t come to the party, he told me that he didn’t feel comfortable driving through my neighborhood as a black man. He feared the neighbors might call the police or that he’d be pulled over in Amherst solely because he was African American.

I was incredulous. I couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea that someone as successful as this news reporter felt uncomfortable in certain places in his own city — even at a coworkers house. The truth is that as a white woman, I navigated the world much differently then he did.

He lived in a different America.

Certainly the America we live in today seems like a foreign country to many of us, but most people believe this wide division between people and political parties and races and religion is a new thing. Here’s what’s interesting: America has been divided since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth.

In a rather fascinating book about America called “American Nations” by Colin Woodard, the searing point is made that the United States is made up of eleven regional federations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another, and that the fault lines have been growing ever deeper since the 1960’s.

As Woodard explains, the United States has long been divided into 11 rival regional “nations” determined by settlement patterns that are centuries old.

You’ve got “Yankeedom” which stretches from the Puritans’ New England to the land settled by their descendants in Upstate New York and the upper Midwest. New Netherland is Greater New York City, more interested in making money than in moralizing like the Yankees, he claims.

The Midlands stretch from once-Quaker Philadelphia across the heart of the Midwest which were dominated by the Germans. They’re known to be more open-minded and less inclined toward activism in government than The Yankees.

He describes eight more regions in his book, all very rich with their own histories and ways of seeing life — like the Deep South or the ” Borderlanders” in Appalachia.

Back in the founding of our country, Woodard says, these “nations” deeply mistrusted one another.

But, the author says, despite this mistrust, the country unified to become one nation. It wasn’t easy:

“The Revolutionary War was a true insurgency only in Yankeedom; ” he writes, “meanwhile, New Netherland became a Loyalist refuge, the pacifist-minded Midlanders lay low, the Deep Southern planters calculated how best to preserve (and expand) their slave economy, the Tidewater split into two camps, and the Borderlanders wrestled over whom they hated more — the British or the coastal elites oppressing them.”

These disputes over ideology and region seem to rage on today, and although we like to think of ourselves as part of a single, united nation, that’s not quite the case. The regional cultures that comprise the United States, according to Woodard, haven’t budged or changed significantly since their settlement. And Woodard claims those divisions still drive politics today.

It’s interesting reading, but I’m not sure our entire country can be defined in such narrow terms. Despite the political and racial divides, America, as an idea, is a beautiful thing. Everyone, I hope, from the Yanks to the southerners in the Deep South, can agree that freedom of speech, of worship, and equality are the things that unite us.

The people of this country must do their part to respect our constitution and insist on a government that functions cleanly and openly to support and drive this unlikely union — this amazing experiment that is America.