Discover Magazine reported on a recent study on the relationship between topography and personality, and reached out to me for my thoughts on the causes of observed differences between the regions. Needless to say, I argued culture — not topography — was the more determinative force at work.
Read on to the article by writer Sophie Putka for the details. And for more on Frederick Jackson Turner’s dead end, check out Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.
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.
A native of Maine, he has reported from more than 50 countries and seven continents and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire and the transition that followed. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago he is past Pew Fellow in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, a recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Excellence in Public Advocacy, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.