This Map Shows How America Is Divided Into 11 Nations

“The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/actually-there-are-11-americas-map-2013-11#ixzz3ktMzETyZ

The Revision of Steve Jobs

It is probably also why the man who helped to will those products into existence has become not just a kind of secular saint, but also a figure whom history has already included in its pantheon of world-changing inventors. Gutenberg, Darwin, Edison … and Steve Jobs.

.. All of which makes it tempting to ignore another thing about Steve Jobs: He could be, on top of so much else, a terrible person. Not just a jerk, occasionally and innocuously, but a bully and a tyrant.

.. They suggest that Jobs’s failings as a person, rather than impeding his legend, actually bolstered it. His uncompromising vision, his unapologetic bullying, his tendency to prioritize the needs of computers over the needs of people—all of that, the lore goes, was somehow necessary. Jobs’s assholery, like his mock turtlenecks and his New Balance running shoes, made him who he was, and thus helped to make Apple what it was. Jobs could be a jerk in the normative sense because he could be a jerk in the narrative. His successes justified his failings.

.. Each summation, each person, is a reminder of the sacrifices Jobs imposed on others in the name of human connection. As Gibney puts it: “How much of an asshole do you have to be, to be successful?”

.. Jobs was, maybe, a Great Man who was also, in many ways, a small child: self-absorbed and desperate to please, those two things not contradicting but instead, in ways productive and not, informing each other.

.. We don’t really know, mostly because these Great Men did their Great Things in the age before video, before social media, before depositions and the documentaries that convert their proceedings into media. They lived in a time that afforded people the luxury of being remembered, and defined, for the What of their lives rather than the Who.

.. He lived in a time—we live in a time—when a new holism is being brought to bear on history, when our assessments of our heroes can take into account not just their achievements, but their smaller, human-scaled contributions.