At Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard shared the results of new research showing the underlying value sets and moral foundations of Americans are distributed differently across U.S. regional cultures. The online piece described… Read more »
Article Topic: Washington Monthly
The early 20th century Appalachian migration to Great Lakes cities created big tensions, but did it help bring down the New Deal coalition?
Readers of American Nations know the U.S. is an awkward federation of regional cultures which don’t see eye to eye. So it’s not surprising that when a huge number of… Read more »
How a “freedom-and-fairness” agenda can save the U.S. republic and federation
In the new print edition of Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab Director Colin Woodard laid out how a “freedom-and-fairness” political agenda can steer the United States out of the dangerous, demagogue-infested… Read more »
Washington Monthly: Woodard on Nationhood Lab’s new insights into the geography of gun violence
For Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard wrote about the findings of a new the project’s recent work on how centuries-old settlement patterns help explain the staggering regional differences… Read more »
U.S. nationhood was created nearly from scratch in the 19th century. Was Daniel Webster responsible?
The early United States, scholars have noted, was a country in search of nationhood. Created as an ad hoc military alliance of disparate colonies to fight off a shared political… Read more »
Reviewing David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed sequel in Washington Monthly
More than thirty years ago, Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer resuscitated the effort to develop a historical narrative of the United States with a book called Albion’s Seed, a sweeping… Read more »
Reviewing Yascha Mounk’s “Great Experiment” in Washington Monthly
The world’s ongoing slide into authoritarianism has generated a frantic effort among political scientists, historians, and national security experts to identify the causes and possible solutions. University of Chicago law… 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 »
How we got here, the stakes and where we go now (in Washington Monthly)
The United States, which was a state before it came up with an argument for being a nation as well, has always been vulnerable to dissolution. An accidental alliance… Read more »
Reviewing Keane’s “New Despotism” in Washington Monthly
Liberal democracies are under siege worldwide and a range of thinkers have been probing the reasons why. John Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Sydney, has a… 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.