November 21, 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The director of Salve Regina University’s Nationhood Lab is on tour promoting Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, a book showcasing the project’s work, presenting before thousands of people at dozens of events across eight states and the District of Columbia.
He presented at New America’s US@250 Experience conference Oct. 29 alongside MSNBC White House correspondent Laura Baron-Lopez, poet Elizabeth Acevedo, and One America CEO Andrew Hanauer. The D.C. event — which seeks to help “build a new American future” — was live-streamed across the country.
“What it meant to be a United States-ian had to be made up ex post facto a generation after the country came together. We were a country first, without a story, and we couldn’t survive without one,” Woodard told the New America audience. There was a battle.. from the 1830s, between two narratives and we’v e been battling over them ever since.”
At Politics & Prose’s flagship store on Connecticut Avenue, Nov. 13, Woodard described how the United States’s fractious geography has always made it structurally vulnerable in a way few of its liberal democratic peers are.
“The U.S. is not a nation-state at all and never has been. We’re a collection of stateless nations, each with their own intents, ideals, and stories of national purpose,” he said in unpacking the American Nations model Nationhood Lab uses in its geospatial data work. “These regional cultures – which don’t respect state or even international boundaries — have never been in agreement over the big questions: what is the proper role of government, the proper relationship between church and state, and even the meaning of such key words in the democratic lexicon as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’“
Woodard also spoke to capacity crowds at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, where Nationhood Lab is based, Mechanics Hall in Portland, Maine, and bookstores and literary festivals in eastern Maine, suburban Boston, western Long Island, southern Michigan, and the West Virgina panhandle.
On November 24 he presents the annual Leeke-Shaw Lecture at the Margaret Chase Smith Library, located on the late senator’s homestead in Skowhegan, Maine. He’ll be at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. on Dec. 2 and the University of Illinois Chicago on Dec. 4.
Nations Apart received a starred review from Booklist and was named a November must read by the Next Big Idea book club. Kirkus called it “a lucid exercise in political geography with tremendous — and disturbing — explanatory power.” The Wall Street Journal reviewer, while defending the notion of the U.S having an “Anglo-Protestant culture, said the “book deserves attention” because “America is in trouble, and some of that trouble is coming from the forces that Mr. Woodard seeks to expose and oppose.”
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.