More on what is a Ruritanian American

Time to dump exposition about background context. I mentioned in my last post that there aren't any Mexicans or other Hispanics in Ruritanian America, mostly just as an aside that there wouldn't be any Spanish names of cities or towns on the Ruritanian Railroad. There's a lot of context behind that. I'm not 100% sure how much I'm interested in getting into all of it, but I'll provide a few links for further reading in case anyone is so inclined. First, though, one has to recognize that while Ruritanian America is a deliberate alternate history... so is the mainstream narrative that most people think is real history. Much of what we "know" about the past is either grossly distorted, or even flat-out wrong. (The same is true for science, by the way. It's not just the news that's fake.)

First, let's start with something that should be obvious (but in fact isn't.) What is an American? A combination of reading the Preamble to the Constitution as well as the first census in America should make that clear. Americans are the Posterity of the Founding Fathers, who founded the American government specifically for their Posterity. The Founding Fathers, or rather the citizenry of the American Nation at it's official founding, was 85% British, 9% Low German, and about 3-4% Dutch (all closely related North Sea Hajnal Line cultures, of course) with a smattering of Scandinavians, Irish, Hugenots and others here and there. By definition, anyone who isn't the Posterity of  this founding population isn't an American.

Granted, plenty of not Americans have moved to America, abandoned as best they could their prior identities, intermarried with the Americans, and their descendants were Americans. Like Ruth speaking to Naomi, they've said to the American people: "Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me." Those peoples, or rather their descendants, are certainly Americans. Then again, those people's descendants are genetically mostly American, and the foreign intermixing involved becomes little more than an interesting conversation piece. My own great-grandfather, while born in America, was an ethnic Portuguese guy. He was actually very aware of his Fake American status, and told people, when he moved from the location he grew up in, that his ancestry was French, because it sounded less foreign that way. But that's besides the point. He's only 1/8 of my genetics, and contributes very little to my behavior, my phenotype, or anything else. My own kids can't even be bothered to figure out what being Portuguese even means.

So, yeah... nobody from the Spaniard or Criollo nation, or the hybridized Spaniardized indio peoples who made up the lower classes of New Spain is an American, nor can they be. Nobody of African descent is an American, nor can they be (ironically, they've said this repeatedly to Americans, and Americans still don't really believe them.) Nobody of Jewish descent is an American. Nobody of Indian descent is either; the Indians were their own nations; the Patuxet, the Naragansett, the Iroquois, the Comanche, etc., etc.

For that matter, it's a bit much to suggest that Americans are all one people. The original formulation of America was that it didn't have to be either; each state was its own nation, united in loose federation with the others. David Hackett Fischer spelled this out quite clearly in Albion's Seed, although he called the various English nations "folkways" instead of nations. But clearly there was a very deep and impassable gulf between the Roundhouds/Puritans/Yankees, for instance, and the other peoples of America. Notably, the Cavaliers/Plantation people/Gone With the Wind type southerners, or the Border Reivers/Backwoodsers/Dukes of Hazzard type southerners. There's a fourth group, too—the Quakers and the Low Germans, but they seem to have been innocuous enough to have gotten along tolerably well with the other three as needed. The enmity between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads goes back to before the English Civil War, however, and when it erupted in the American Civil War, it was not what you thought it was about; it was purely racial and cultural enmity and covetousness. The Roundheads wanted to conquer the Cavaliers and loot their land. Most of what you think you know about the Civil War is false. For a start, read the chapters on Lincoln here, but look through the endnotes to the chapter for more information. Appendix A is a copy of one of the greatest speeches ever written, and it's only the propaganda of Lincoln hagiographers who have promoted the Gettysburg Address instead. After all, the Roundheads are desperate to validate their choice to conquer the rest of America, destroy the Constitutional government, and somehow still believe themselves to be justified in doing so. The Yankees are the problem with America and have brought us to the brink of annihilation, as Clyde Wilson has so clearly argued. So they came up with an after the fact justification that they fought the civil war to free the slaves. Nobody bought it in the decades after the war, but by the time our generation has come along, no other narrative had been presented in over a hundred years, really, so most people accepted that narrative uncritically.

Anyway, that's the true history of America, or at least a very brief explanation of where true history differs from the narrative alternative history that most Americans believe today. My Ruritanian America differs from the narrative, of course, but it is also alternative history, and differs from true history as well. (The difference being that I'm doing it on purpose, am up-front about it, and know the difference. Unlike with the alternative history that makes up the mainstream narrative.) Ruritanian Americans are Americans that founded a true independent state separate from the other three American systems: the Union of the Yankees, the Confederacy of the Cavaliers, and the Republic of Texas, which in my alternative history managed to never have to join the Union and remained an independent Republic, albeit one that is culturally American. One that is very specifically Borderer American, since that was the founding population of Texas; backwoodsy Americans from Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, etc. The Ruritanians are also made up of a similar population, and see the Texans (and to a lesser extent the Confederates) as their brothers. They are wary and distrustful of the Yankees, they have no problems with the Quakers and in fact many live among them, mostly integrated. They found slavery distasteful, and were glad when, in the 1870s and 1880s, the Confederates made manumission the official policy, the slaves were freed, and many of them returned to Africa to found Liberia, or to Caribbean and Central American nations that were made up of majority Africans, like Haiti or Jamaica. Those that remained never had any reason to participate in the Great Migration, because in the alternate history, that never would have happened, so they remain a rural, Southern people almost exclusively. Some former citizens of New Spain and later Mexico lived in isolated tiny hamlets, since New Spain claimed some of this territory, but they never really settled it. Their demographic influence, like that of the Africans, is nonexistent in Ruritanian America.

Because Diversity + Proximity = Violence, Ruritanian America, and the rest of the culturally American countries, have relative peace after the attempted war of Lincoln's aggression failed. Ruritanians remained neutral, but were sympathetic to the Confederate cause over that of the Unionists, not being fooled by Union propaganda. Therefore, the nations of North America remain pretty homogenous; Borderers in Texas and Ruritanian America, Cavaliers in the Confederacy, and Yankees in the Union. Africans still make up a significant minority in the Confederacy, although not so much as they did in the real timeline, since many of them took charitable passage to Liberia, Haiti or elsewhere to be chart their own destiny in their own homelands. And the Indians remain in pockets too, although most have integrated more or less peacefully into American society after having it made quite clear that their habit of raiding and looting white settlements would not be tolerated, and only in the lands of the Yankees have they been forced into reservations (just as in the real world; the current reservation policy was one of Ulysses Grant's from 1868 on.)

Another side effect of this is that most of America would never become overly corporatized by robber barons, since only in Yankee America did conditions exist where this was permissible. Ruritania remains a primarily rural nation of homesteaders and single-family farmers, artisans and craftsman, living a much more egalitarian life than that in corporatized America, or plantation America either one. This will be readily apparent in the more "primitive" life represented on the RSA RR. Technological, social, and political change is slow to come to Ruritanian America, and it takes its time digesting innovations thoroughly before embracing them warts and all. In this regard, the time frame of the Ruritanian America Railroad will be difficult to pin down. While some elements will seem like lingering impacts from the Old West era, in other areas, technology here and there can resemble a much later period, although it will be rare to nonexistent that anything postdating 1940 or so in the real world would have any place whatsoever in Ruritanian America. While it may seem odd to think of a frontier-like environment in many ways up until the 40s, keep in mind that a lot of the political and social pressure that made America the dystopia that it has become for the posterity of the Founding Fathers today never happened in this alternative timeline. There was no wave of Ellis Island immigration, complete with anti-American Bolshevik sympathizers, agitators and spies. There was no World War, or at least not any American involvement in it. Without the leveraged robber baron stock market, there was no rapid explosion of financial growth, although in return, there was no Great Depression either. Economically and socially, this timeline is much more laid-back and less fraught with drama. (Except among the Yankees, of course. They routinely experience bank panics and recessions. The Ruritanians were smart enough to not even consider abandoning the gold standard or establishing a federal bank.)

While it would make sense for Indian names to be common in Ruritanian America (as they are in the real world) I'm not going to use any, for the simple reason that I don't wish to do the research to find good alternative Indian place-names. There are also no Spanish placenames, or French placenames, or anything really that isn't English or occasionally German, Dutch or Scandinavian. Place names are often taken from historical figures, heroes of the American revolution, the Civil War (Confederate heroes, of course) and the Texian Republic. 

The closest allies of the Ruritanians are these selfsame Texians, actually. In this alternative timeline, Mexico is a relatively weak entity; not only did the Texian rebellion succeed, but so did the Republics of Rio Grande, Tabasco, Zacatecas and the Yucatan. The Riograndians tend to be friendly with the Ruritanians as well.

Although they don't border them, so their interaction is somewhat limited, the Ruritanians get along reasonably well with the Cavalier Confederacy. Their relationship with the Union Yankees is more strained, as the Ruritanians have a strongly held belief that Yankees can't be trusted and have tried to swindle and get the best of them repeatedly. This did erupt in the 1920s into a short war between the two states, which ended in a stalemate, and a peace treaty was signed without any territory or anything else changing hands, ultimately. Although relationships with European powers is more aloof, the Ruritanians are relatively friendly with both the Prussians and the Austrians, as well as Sweden and England. To be fair, the Ruritanians tend to like the Celtic nations of Britain better than the English themselves, though. In spite of their recognized mostly English ancestry, they still remember the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and feel like what was best about England was distilled in the diaspora populations in America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The idea that the Scottish, Cornish, Welsh, etc. have suffered under the English makes them sympathetic, like brothers in arms, sorta. This does somewhat limit the ability of the English and Ruritanian governments to work together.

Naturally, all of these attitudes reflect my own attitudes quite a bit, since Ruritanian America is my idealized version of what America should and could have been had mistakes not been made, as the saying goes. It's not only idealized, but it exists in a fantasy geography. It doesn't overlap with any real features or places, somehow Ruritanian America exists in North America independently of the geography that's actually here. That said, it resembles many regions in America very closely. Notably:

• The first module will be a West Texas desert-like biome, although the extension block will have east Texas and Louisiana style bayous, and will resemble somewhat portions of the Deep South. This isn't to suggest that all of the desert territory looks like West Texas and the neighboring parts of New Mexico, merely that I don't want to bother modeling various different desert territories and making a meaningful distinction between them.
• The second module will be an Appalachian or Ozark-like forested hill country, where coal mining will be the primary economic activity. The bridge between this and the next module will be merely transitional rather than attempting to create a new biome.
• The third module will be Rocky Mountain style territory, with more mining and logging as important industries.
• Although I have no intention of making a module for this, because in general I find the terrain would be difficult to model to my satisfaction where I liked it, vast tracts of prairie belong to Ruritanian America too. Maybe I'll find a way to make a prairie expansion with grain and livestock as the major industries yet, but right now I have no such plans. If I ever do, I'd like to have them resemble the Wildcat Hills area more than the flatter prairie. Or maybe the badlands of the Dakotas, a little bit. Come to think of it, putting a Mitchell Pass and Chimney Rock like feature out there with bales of hay in the foreground might be kind of fun. Maybe there'll be room to incorporate a bit of that in the area between the pseudo-Appalachians and the pseudo-Rockies? I'll have to think on that...
• There is only a tiny portion of the Deep South, and mostly just because I want to model a bayou than because I think it really fits my vision of Ruritanian America. That territory more properly belongs to the Confederacy. There isn't any New England or Left Coast territory at all.