May 8, 2026
NEWPORT, R.I. — Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard argued that Americans need to stand up for the Declaration of Independence’s vision for the United States as the country faces a resurgence in “blood and soil” ethnonational authoritarianism at events across New England to mark the document’s 250th birthday.
On Mar. 3, he joined Pell Center executive director Jim Ludes and his Salve Regina University colleagues, Profs. Mary Anderson and William Leeman, at a special America 250 forum at the university’s campus in Newport, Rhode Island. He shared Nationhood Lab’s polling work showing the Declaration’s vision is far more popular than the ethnonational one asserted by Trump, Vance, and other top administration officials.
This spring, Woodard also presented the project’s work to capacity audiences convened by the Pejepscot Historical Society in Brunswick, Maine, the Newport Historical Society in Rhode Island, the Salem Athenaeum and Emmanuel College in Massachusetts, the Bethel Historical Society in western Maine, and at the American Independence Center in Exeter, New Hampshire to culminate that historic town’s 250th community read of his books, Nations Apart and American Nations. Later this month he’ll share his work at the 2026 WBUR Festival in Boston.
At the events, Woodard noted that the U.S. is celebrating its 250th birthday at a moment of crisis, with the country now a “hybrid regime,” no longer a properly functioning democracy, not yet an autocracy. Key to its survival, Nationhood Lab’s work has shown, is for Americans to defend the Declaration of Independence’s vision of the country’s purpose: to seek to create a society where all can live in freedom, with their natural rights protected.
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.