I’ll be speaking about American Nations, the eleven rival regional cultures of North America, in Provo, Utah this coming Thursday, October 3rd, at Brigham Young University. The talk, which kicks off at 11 am, is the annual Chauncy D Harris Lecture hosted by the Department of Geography. I believe it’s free and open to the public, and it certainly is for the BYU community. Details herein.
There’s never been one America, I argued in American Nations, but rather several Americas, each with its own, centuries-old ideals, values, and religious and cultural heritage. Understanding the real map of the continent and its rival cultures is essential to understanding our history, from the divisions of the American Revolution and the Civil War to the “blue county / red county” election cycles, past, present, and future. I’ll show how early colonial settlement patterns shaped the continent’s cultural, political, and religious landscape, the constitutional structure of the union, and our linguistic, political, and genealogical landscape, with updated data and insights from my work at Nationhood Lab.
As a cultural historian, it’ll be a treat to be back in Utah. I wrote about the state’s consequential ethnographic history and how it affects regional planning for Politico a few years back. BYU Radio did excellent episodes using my work on the national narrative and on American Character‘s themes, while KUER’s Radio West (based in Salt Lake City) did fantastic longform interviews with me on American Nations and American Character and Republic of Pirates. Utah has some exceptionally good radio!
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven 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 Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.