I love that Arroyo Grande—especially Branch Street Arroyo Grande—has an independent bookstore. My ego is happy because Monarch Books carries my books. We were waiting for a table to open across the street—my elder son’s and my younger sister’s birthdays—so I wandered across Branch to look for my books. I found them, but even I’m not so vain as to go into a bookstore and just looky-loo.

So I bought a book. This book.

I’ve only just started it, but it’s already one of the most extraordinary books I’ve read in years. I rarely start books at the beginning, so I dove into the first chapter about one of Woodard’s seven nations, “Greater Appalachia,” because my father’s family has roots there, planted firmly on Missouri’s Ozark Plateau.

It reminded me of another extraordinary book I read years ago. I shared excerpts from Albion’s Seed with my AGHS history students, again, partly out of vanity, because another part of my family, Episcopalians all, comes from a second nation in Woodard’s book, “Tidewater.” They lived in places whose names—Fredericksburg, Spotslyvania, Petersburg—would be known as terrible battlefields a century after their arrival in America.

One of them, a collateral ancestor, Roger Gregory, married Mildred Washington, the great man’s aunt, and that homely name has persisted in my family, down to my own Aunt Mildred, who preferred to be called “Bill.”

Roger eventually sold Mt. Vernon to Washington’s father. My family is not known for its real estate acumen.

But Albion’s Seed revealed that Tidewater Virginians socialized their children by teaching them dance. That tradition carried down to my grandfather, John Smith Gregory, allegedly the sweetest waltzer in Texas County, Missouri. John could make his partner believe that the sawdust-strewn floor at a barn dance was polished glass. Even in his fifties, his partners were usually teenaged girls, waiting patiently for their turn on Mr. Gregory’s dance card.

My grandmother seethed. What can I say about my Grandmother Gregory? When she visited us kids in Arroyo Grande, we hid her dentures.

Her fried chicken, however, was sublime.

One day in 1933, she called my dad back to the farmhouse, which is still there, because he was barefoot. Dad was going to cross the road with Grandfather John to visit a neighbor. Grandma Gregory’s Scots-Irish pride would not permit a son of hers to visit Mr. Dixon barefoot.

So my grandfather, mostly deaf by then, never heard the speeding Ford roadster that killed him.

They let schools out the day of Mr. Gregory’s funeral.

There have been other books written about people like my ancestors, who migrated from the English Midlands to Tidewater Virginia, then Kentucky, then Missouri, until oil brought them to California. But other ancestors, like my Grandmother Gregory’s, came from Ulster or the Scots Lowlands, desperately poor, oppressed and spoiling for a fight. If they couldn’t get one in the British Isles, they’d be happy to start one in America. Woodard calls them the Borderlanders.

Former Virginia Sen. James Webb wrote Born Fighting, about the Scots-Irish military tradition in American history. Many of them, of course, marched in Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry,” perhaps the finest infantry in the Victorian world, named for the rapidity of their marching. My Uncle Tilford’s middle name was “Stonewall.” So it goes.

And, of course, JD Vance’s offering was Hillbilly Elegy, a petulant book I started twice and then put down, never to return. I have started David Copperfield six times, and I will finish it because the book deserves it.

American Nations deserves a first reading and then many more.

To my shock, I discovered the echo of the January 6 people in the first chapter about “Greater Appalachia,” a region whose culture informs the Ozark Plateau.

Among the observations that Woodard makes about the people of Greater Appalachia, whom he calls the Borderlanders:

–They didn’t trust law courts. Justice, instead, was personal and retributive. The Hatfield-McCoy bloodletting is an example of a Borderland tradition that persisted long after their ancestors came to America.

–Within the group, Borderlanders did not tolerate dissent. Those, including kin, who violated the moral code, grounded in a cultural construct of reality, were dealt with violently.

–Borderlanders hated outsiders, most of all Native Americans, on whose land they squatted. When indigenous people resisted, the retribution visited on them was merciless, including the scalping of children.

–Because they’d been so exploited by absentee landlords in England, Scotland and Ulster, they despised city people, including those in Philadelphia, where a group took up arms, marched on the City of Brotherly Love (even Philadelphia’s Quakers took up arms) and were turned back by cannon loaded almost to the muzzle with grapeshot and by sweet Enlightenment reasoning. Negotiation with Benjamin Franklin finally persuaded the insurrectionists, known as “the Paxton Boys,” to go home.

–While Borderlanders resented the wealthy and the powerful, they followed their own leaders, who rose to the top not because of their command of policy or sweet reasoning, but by the force of their personalities, their emotional appeal and the blandishment of their personal wealth. Disparities in wealth were enormous among these people, and they were tolerated. Woodard notes that the top ten percent monopolized land in AppalachianAmerica, while the lower half had no land at all.

It struck me, in reading the passage about the march on Philadelphia, that MAGA, as far back as 1764, has been an American tradition. Today’s movement, of course, is not ethnic, but it has the trappings—a sense of injustice, of entitlement, of envy and of incipient rage— the same forces that drove the Paxton Boys’ march on the city they despised.

I found some comfort in this understanding, which I hope is accurate, because, after all, we survived 1764.

There are other inklings of hope in my Borderland ancestry. I am named for and descended from two Confederate officers, one, a brigadier general (James McBride died of illness in 1862); the other, his son, Capt. Douglass McBride (my middle name), was vaporized by a Yankee artillery shell in Arkansas the same year.

You’d think we would’ve learned, except for my Uncle Tilford Stonewall Gregory’s middle name.

One of Tilford’s sons, Roy, was my cousin. When World War II came to America, Roy, from the Missouri Ozarks, joined the Army and became a member of the Oklahoma-based 45th Infantry Division. He would fight in Italy and Western Europe and was wounded twice—both times from shell fragments from the superb German field gun, the 88— and was recovering from the second when the Germans launched Operation Nordwind in January 1945, in support of the greater offensive in the Battle of the Bulge.

Roy, in recovery, was discharged from the hospital and sent to the front, to a French town, WIngen-sur-Moder, on the German frontier. His company was attacked by Waffen-SS mountain troops, soldiers who fought without mercy, and it was their artillery that finally claimed him. He died on the steps of the village church.

He came home to Greater Appalachia, to the Allen Cemetery in Texas County, Missouri, where his grave is not far from our Grandfather John’s, the sweetest waltzer in Texas County, Missouri.

My cousin, you see, was an Antifascist.

My cousin Roy; the church where he died.

–Jim Gregory’s book Patriot Graves: Discovering a California Town’s Civil War Heritage, is about the sixty Union Civil War veterans buried in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery.