Nationhood Lab’s director was the guest on the 400th episode of the award-winning public television series, co-produced by the Pell Center and Rhode Island PBS
On July 4, project director Colin Woodard discussed Nationhood Lab’s groundbreaking work on a shared American story on “Story in the Public Square,” the award-winning public affairs television series broadcast in 300 public television markets each week.
Woodard explained the project’s research on the values and ideas that have come to define America and its citizens, and the eternal conflict between competing national narratives, one civic (and based on the ideals in the Declaration of Independence), the other ethnonationalist (arguing the U.S. belongs to a subset of its citizens with privileged bloodlines.) He argued that not having an effective civic story has put the country in danger and he described Nationhood Lab’s research to test and develop such a story.
“We actually had an insurrection against our government, and the person who encouraged it and was to benefit from it and was facing criminal indictments for it has been reelected president and pardoned the violent people who attacked our Capitol building,” Woodard noted. “That alone — just that fact — shows that your country, your western or liberal democracy, is in a bit of a crisis.”
“Most Americans prefer to define our country based on the ideals in the Declaration, rather than basing it on shared heritage or history or ancestry or characteristics that are kind of intrinsic to people, tied to bloodlines,” he said. “We need to use that.”
The show, which is produced at Rhode Island PBS and also airs on Sirius XM’s POTUS channel, is a co-production of the Pell Center and is co-hosted by the research center’s director, Jim Ludes, and veteran journalist G. Wayne Miller, who leads Pell’s Ocean State Stories project. It has won 15 Telly Awards, an honor devoted to cable and local productions. Woodard’s segment — freely available for streaming— was the show’s 400th episode and kicked off its 15th season.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, examines regional issues in American life and has developed a revised civic national story for the 21st century United States tied to the ideals in the Declaration.