November 7, 2026
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota – Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard presented Nationhood Lab’s work in the context of the 250th and the ongoing authoritarian threat at venues across the country over the past two months.
In early October, he spoke at the 2026 MinnPost Festival in Minneapolis, in conversation with Hacer executive director Rodolfo Gutierrez, about the historical reasons for the country’s divisions, the eternal fight over the “soul” of the U.S., and the key role Minnesotans have played in turning the tide against the current authoritarian threat. In late September he joined other public intellectuals, civic leaders, academics, and journalists at a special convening at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences‘ headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts reflecting on the nation’s experience in commemorating the 250th. In the discussions, kicked off by Harvard’s Danielle Allen, Woodard emphasized the continuing threat to the survival of the American Experiment. He reiterated these points in a Scholars Strategy Network webinar with Georgia State University’s Jennifer McCoy Oct. 6.
To help close out the 250th, he gave a talk at Philadelphia’s Carpenter’s Hall — the building where the First Continental Congress met in 1774 — where he explained why Pennsylvania has always been a key swing state and how its role in spawning not one but two regional cultures shaped the culture and politics of huge swaths of the continent. “In tight elections, it’s always on the edge…and then it’s almost unanimous in these big omnibus elections, switching over from one party to the other, along with the rest of the country,” he said of the Midlands, the massive cultural region whose roots begin with William Penn’s Quakerism-informed utopia. “And in many ways, Pennsylvania has also been the keystone that can hold our nation together.”
The Carpenter’s Hall talk was covered by City & State Pennsylvania, which had a reporter in the audience. Woodard also spoke on the project’s work at events in Austin, Texas, Richmond, Virginia and Charlestown, Massachusetts.
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.