APRIL 19, 2026
BOSTON – Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard shared Nationhood Lab’s work on American divisions and the story that unites the U.S. to audiences at Emmanuel College Boston and the Salem Athenaeum in Massachusetts.
At Emmanuel College, located on the Fenway in Boston, Woodard delivered the annual Catherine McLaughlin Hakim ’70 Lecture on April 10, introduced by college president Beth Ross and Dr. David Hakim, who established the lecture in honor of his late wife. He described how American democracy has been impreilled – both in the past and in the present – by proponents of an authoritarian ethnonationalist identity for the U.S., and the importance of fighting for a national identity rooted in a commitment to trying to achieve the natural rights ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
“The struggle over those ideas is not new,” Woodard, author of Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, said. “It is a central, recurring feature of the American experience.”
Emmanuel College described the event in a feature article published April 16 in The Pulse, the university’s official news organ. The Hakim Lecture Series is sponsored by the college’s sociology department and focuses on issues of sociology, social justice and public policy on the local, national and international levels.
“Democracy is not self-sustaining,” he told the audience of students, faculty and trustees. “It depends on participation, on institutions, and on a shared commitment to the rules of the system.”
On April 16, Woodard presented the project’s work to the Salem Athenaeum as the 2026 Adams Lecture, which is “devoted to topics pertaining to American history with a focus on New England.” Past speakers include Gordon Wood, David Hackett Fisher, David Blight and Nathaniel Philbrick.
“When I would speak about all this say, a year ago, I said we were about to learn if Americans – if we – are capable of standing up for our founding ideals, of fighting for our freedom now that it must be fought for,” Woodard told the audience gathered at Salem’s historic Tabernacle Church, home to a congregation dating back to 1629. “The answer — the people of Minneapolis especially have shown us with great courage and at risk to themselves — is yes. Now that Americans have actually seen what authoritarianism looks like for themselves, sometimes up close, they do not like it.”
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.