December 15, 2025
CHICAGO – Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard has just completed an eight state-and-D.C. tour promoting Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America (Viking/Random House), a book showcasing Nationhood Lab’s work what divides us and how we can overcome those divisions. On December 2, he presented before a full house at Tufts University’s Tisch College for Civic of Civic Life, an event written up by Tufts Now, the university’s official publication, in an article entitled “Why the Nation is Fracturing and What to Do About It.”
The battle between a blood-and-soil, ethnonationalist vision of the U.S. and one rooted in the ideals in the Declaration of Independence has been our eternal struggle, Woodard said. “The civic national vision didn’t triumph for the first time, federation-wide, until the 1960s, not the 1860s,” he added. “It’s an incredible gift that had to be fought for and continues to be fought for.”
On Dec. 4, Woodard presented the project’s work on the geography of health at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Applied Health Sciences, where he addressed an audience of clinicians, health educators, university administrators, and members of the public. Nationhood Lab has collaborated with UIC physiologist Ross Arena and others on research into population or “national” level cultural determinants of health, generating more than thirty peer-reviewed scientific articles in as many months.
During the tour, Woodard discussed the book and project on several hour-format statewide and regional public radio programs, including Philadelphia NPR superstation WHYY’s The Connection, KERA Dallas’s nationally syndicated Think, Maine Public radio’s Maine Calling and Utah Public Radio’s Access Utah. He also did an extended Q&A feature with the Boston Globe that published Nov. 9, and in-depth interviews with The Dispatch‘s Kevin Williamson, The Politics Guys, Stand Up! with Pete, and other podcasts and radio programs.
Nationhood Lab, based at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, 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. The project delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.