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About Nationhood Lab
Based at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, the Nationhood Lab 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.
More News and Analysis from Nationhood Lab
September 15, 2025
MISSISSAUGA, Ontario and NEWPORT, R.I. -- In the United States, Northeastern and Midwestern residents tend to have higher physical, social, mental and financial—i.e., “traditional”—wellness, while Southern residents have report higher “existential” wellness, involving a sense of purpose, fulfillment and community identity, according to a new analysis of survey data from more than 325,000 Americans.
Most Americans say they support the liberal democratic values at the core of the American Experiment, but would they actually do so in practice when doing so might not help their “side” obtain or sustain power? The answer, according to our latest surveys, is “yes,” for most Americans, but not necessarily on the American right.
In Smithsonian Magazine, Nationhood Lab Director Colin Woodard shares the backstory of one of the United States's misguided national origin stories. Frederick Jackson Turner's massively influential and deeply flawed Frontier Thesis, which dominated the teaching and public understanding of American history for half a century after it was first presented at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, was a cul-de-sac of nationhood building
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently a director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. As State and National affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. A contributing editor at POLITICO, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.
A native of Maine, he has reported from more than 50 countries and seven continents and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire and the transition that followed. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a past Pew Fellow in international journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for excellence in public advocacy.