For the country’s 250th birthday, Colin Woodard shared insights on the country’s regional divides, territorial expansion and national identity crisis alongside leading historians
For the nation’s 250th birthday, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard spoke with the BBC and Politico about the meaning of the U.S. history, how the country expanded, and the still unresolved battle over its meaning and purpose.
Politico asked Woodard and ten other historians for their take on what makes someone American. “We’ve been fighting over this since Day One. Are we just another nation defined by shared bloodlines, religion or history, or are we defined by our commitment to a set of ideals…in our opening statement as a people, the Declaration of Independence?” he said. “If it’s the latter, then there are no privileged bloodlines, no American Herrenvolk.”
He was also asked to give the current state of U.S. democracy a letter grade. He assigned a D. “Close to failure, but with still enough time in the term to claw back to a poor, but passing, grade,” he said.
You can read his other responses — and those of David Blight, Alan Taylor, Keisha Blain and others — in the story, “Has Trump Changed Democracy Forever? We Asked 11 Historians,” which appeared July 4.
The BBC’s North America correspondent interviewed Woodard about how the separate regional cultures of the U.S. and immigration drove territorial expansion for a text feature ahead of the 4th. “We have the meta struggle in American history: are we a civic nation devoted to… a society where every individual human can be equally, universally and sustainably free over time?” he said. “Or is this a state that belongs to a certain group of people that are the real Americans by blood and descent?”
The feature, which also quotes historian Heather Cox Richardson, was published July 3.
Woodard was interviewed by 32 other media outlets on Nationhood Lab’s work over the past two weeks, including PRI’s The World, the Dutch newsmagazine Der Grone Amsterdammer, and network television affiliates in D.C, Seattle, Atlanta, Tampa, Austin, and other cities.
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.