Nationhood Lab will be engaged in a variety of initiatives, from convenings and presentations to collaborations with partner organizations engaged in the protection of the American experiment. Watch this space as the project unfolds ahead of the United States’ 250th birthday in 2026.
Public Health and the American Nations research collaborative
Nationhood Lab has joined researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Minneapolis-based HealthPartners Institute to study regional differences in various indices of health via the American Nations model. In the first two years of this collaboration the core research team — Ross Arena from UIC, HealthPartners president Nico Pronk, and Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard — and their collaborators have published twenty-five scientific papers in nine peer-reviewed journals: The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, Progress in Cardiovascular Disease, Current Problems in Cardiology, the American Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Health Promotion, the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention, the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, Public Health in Practice, and the Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors. Their work has explored regional differences in obesity, diabetes, physical inactivity, sleep disturbances, disabilities, healthy dietary practices, oral health, arthritis, life expectancy, and the Social Vulnerability Index, as well as the overlap of physical inactivity to the density of church congregations and political behavior. They have also developed a new Lifestyle Health Index and applied it to show the interrelationship between voter participation and health outcomes at the U.S. county-level, subject of their commentary in The Lancet‘s regional journal for the western hemisphere.
Building on this work, in early 2025 they published a major paper laying on an ecosystem-style model for evaluating the relationship between culture and health outcomes using the American Nations model and mediated by the political and social determinants of health. A second paper, with Woodard as lead author, formally laid out the American Nations model for use by medical and public health researchers. Both papers appeared in a special issue of Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases on culture and health guest edited by Pronk and Arena. In subsequent papers in two other journals, the researchers tested the validity of the ecosystem model using artificial intelligence-driven statistical techniques, validating its predictive efficacy for mortality and health lifespan and for obesity and physical inactivity prevalence. Eight additional researchers from UIC, HealthPartners or UCLA have been involved in one or another of the papers, including experts in rheumatology, dentistry, cardiology, and the political economy of health.
On the strength of this work, in late September 2023 Woodard presented the work of Nationhood Lab and the utility of the American Nations model at a meeting of the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering’s working group on obesity solutions. In 2025, Woodard will be presenting the work to the clinical staff of MaineHealth, Maine’s largest hospital and medical provider network, and in a keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Maine Public Health Association.
Additional research is underway and multiple papers are in-review that leverage the insights in American Nations to better understand and mitigate a wide range of regional health disparities in the United States.
Teaching and Debating United States National Narratives
Nationhood Lab has started a new collaborative initiative to provide curricular support for the work of David R. McMahon, professor of history at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who uses American Nations, Union, American Character and Nationhood Lab’s data journalism in the classroom. McMahon is teaching and perfecting a history instructional unit entitled “The Problem of Union: A New National Story” which introduces students to debates over America’s origins and competing national myths, and engage them in an effort to create a new, more effective national narrative for the future. From this he also intends to create a deliberative, nonpartisan dialogue guide suitable for community conversations modeled on the National Issues Forums (NIFI) Issue Guides. McMahon’s work is eminently scalable, a task Nationhood Lab will assist with over the coming year.