Star Tribune staff columnist Jill Burcum sought out the American Nations angle to the Trump administration’s deadly and frequently lawless operation in the North Star State.
Minnesota Star Tribune staff columnist Jill Burcum recently interviewed Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard about the regional origins of her state’s resistance to the Trump administration’s ongoing operation, triggered by ICE’s widespread violations of the law and constitution and apparent murder of peaceful citizens.
“The current powder keg in Minnesota was entirely predictable for those who’ve read an intriguing and provocative 2011 political science book called ‘American Nations,'” Burcum wrote in her story, published Feb. 9. “One of my working theories is that our state’s Yankeedom culture is driving the fierce citizen pushback that caught federal immigration officials by surprise. I asked Woodard about this, and he agreed.”
Woodard shared the cultural characteristics of the Yankee cultural zone — the section of the country first colonized by New England Puritans and their descendants, who laid down their cultural values as they went — which are common to states from Minnesota to Maine, where ICE was also engaged in a simultaneous, unpopular crackdown.
The story was republished by at least 27 other daily newspapers across the country, including the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, Sacramento Bee, San Antonio Star-Telegram, Charlotte Observer, Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader and the Idaho Statesman.
Woodard’s American Nations model is widely used in academia to analyze regional phenomena and powers much of Nationhood Lab’s data journalism and peer-reviewed research collaborations. Much of this follow-on work appears in a new book, Nations Apart, released in November.
The Minnesota (nee Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, founded in 1867, is the seventh largest print daily in the United States and is distributed across the Upper Midwest.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.