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 »
Article Topic: Washington Monthly
U.S. nationhood was created nearly from scratch in the 19th century. Was Daniel Webster responsible?
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 »
American Nations and the geography of the pandemic
The geography of the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic follows, like so many other things in American life, the fissures of identified in American Nations to a startling degree…. Read more »
The American Nations and the Geography of the Pandemic Response
Depressingly, as the global coronavirus pandemic unfolded, President Trump took measures that helped it along: denying it existed; denying it was more serious than the seasonal flu; denying it was… Read more »
Reviewing DeParle’s book on migrants in Washington Monthly
Jason DeParle, a George Polk Award–winning reporter for the New York Times, embedded with a family of Manila slum dwellers thirty-three years ago and has kept contact with them ever… Read more »
The 2018 midterms, the American Nations and Washington Monthly
I have an expanded version of my American Nations-powered analysis of the results of 2018 midterm election here in the U.S. over at Washington Monthly. Please check it out. For… 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.