You can accurately map the cultural borders of the U.S. just by looking at the first names people gave their kids in the 1800s.
SSRN · March 18, 2026 · 6425010
The Takeaway
While we think of American culture as a rapidly shifting melting pot, census data from 1850–1930 reveals that sub-regional cultural boundaries (like the Deep South vs. Appalachia) remained incredibly stable despite massive economic and institutional changes. It suggests our cultural 'DNA' is fixed by early settlement patterns far more than we realize.
From the abstract
This paper recovers the cultural geography of the United States from first-name patterns in census data spanning 1850 to 1930. Using unsupervised clustering of county-level name distributions, we identify spatially coherent cultural regions that align with historically recognized settlement patterns and remain stable across eight decades of economic and institutional change. The deepest division separates North from South, but finer groupings (New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Appalachia, the Deep