Clint Watts, NBC security analyst and author of Messing With the Enemy, had me on his podcast, Selected Wisdom, this past week. We talked about how my experiences as a student and journalist in the Balkans and Eastern Europe helped lead to writing American Nations; about the collapse of our shared national story and the need to revitalize it to hold the U.S. together, and how President Zelensky has successfully recast Ukraine’s national narrative on the fly in the midst of a horrific invasion.
Hope you enjoy the conversation as I did. If you’re interested in the national narrative — subject of a project I’m launching at the Pell Center — check out my most recent book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.
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.