As the effort to protect Americans’ voting rights hit a wall in the U.S. Senate, The New Yorker profiled one of the effort’s biggest Senate champions, Senator Angus King, the… Read more »
Article Topic: Media
Joining the Pell Center
In personal news, as they say, I was recently named a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, a think tank at Salve Regina… Read more »
How January 6th played out through the eyes of six Mainers at the Capitol
For the first anniversary of the January 6th coup attempt in Washington, I recreated the day in the lives of six Mainers who were at the Capitol complex that day:… Read more »
A former CIA and NSA director on American Nations and the authoritarian threat to the U.S.
“I am worried about our country, as I was about Bosnia 30 years ago,” General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency under George W…. Read more »
Talking Union and America’s search for national identity with PBS’ “Story in the Public Square”
Maintaining a shared sense of nationhood has always been a special challenge for the United States, arguably the world’s first civic nation, one defined not by organic ties, but by… Read more »
Reviewing Matthew Pearl’s “Taking of Jemima Boone” in Washington Monthly
“The frontier” has played a huge role in the American imagination, a place where civilization and savagery supposedly met and the former — with allegedly heroic intent and deeds —… Read more »
Talking pirates on Spotify’s hit podcast Real Pirates
Bristol, England-based podcast producers Noiser recently reached out to interview me for an extended series they’re doing for Spotify on the golden age pirates whose story I reassembled in my… Read more »
Reviewing Alex von Tunzelmann’s “Fallen Idols” in the Washington Post
In Sunday’s Washington Post I reviewed Alex von Tunzelmann’s new book, Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues that Made History. It’s extremely topical, providing historical and comparative context for thinking about the evaluation and potential… Read more »
Talking American Nations, 10 years later, with The Daily Beast
American Nations just turned ten years old and, given all that’s happened to the United States since 2011, Kevin Lee recently gave me a call to talk about it for… Read more »
9/11 Started Here, in Portland, Maine
The leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, spent his last night and the morning of September 11th on the outskirts of Portland, Maine, amid the mundane commercial sprawl of… Read more »
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.