Tired of Ameriwank clogging up the fora? Sick of fantasy maps that show US borders stretching inexplicably to include Baja California, Ontario and New Brunswick? Well, now is your chance to take revenge.
Your mission is to
commit cultural genocide (destroy the American way of life, American exceptionalism, American culture). What takes its place? That's up to you.
This is an open-ended challenge, meant to flex your creative muscles.
Bonus points if you manage to include historical ironies (example: Cherokees force Jackson to march westward, sobbing).
This is not an easy task. The three (the usual figure) colonial hearths that formed OTL American culture (New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia/Chesapeake Bay) were seemingly destined by demography to dominate the continent. New England, especially, had unrivaled advantages: whole families migrated, they multiplied like rabbits, they had access to British capital, they had high literacy rates, they came from a somewhat wealthy background, and they had a unified sense of purpose. How would you get them to be not only a defeated people, but an utterly demoralized one whose dreams of being a "City on a Hill" have been dashed forever? And not only New England, of course, but the rest of OTL American culture?
POD: any time between 1664 and 1900.