The website for my new think tank project at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Nationhood Lab, went live last week with fresh American Nations-powered analysis of the 2022 midterm elections and lots of background on what the project will do. I hope you’ll take a look.
Here’s a piece on the launch from Salve Regina University, where the Pell Center is based.
Nationhood Lab is an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability. It will deliver more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it. Readers of American Nations, American Character, and Union will recognize the mission mirrors the themes of these three books and seeks to use them in helping troubleshoot key problems imperiling the United States.
The data journalism portal will feature new research and analysis on a regular basis, often examining political, economic, cultural, social, historical, and public policy phenomena via the regional cultures identified in American Nations. The core work of the initiative, however, is to develop, test, and help disseminate a revised civic national narrative for the United States which can help bond the federation together.
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.