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NATIONS APART

Colin Woodard

How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America

The bestselling author of American Nations offers a powerful paradigm for understanding the defining hot button issues of contemporary America and the action we can take to bridge our cultural divisions and save the republic.
To truly grasp the roots of America's public health crises, economic inequality, and political polarization, we must examine the country's longstanding regional divides. In Nations Apart, Colin Woodardan expert on North American regionalism and European ethnonationalism delves into how centuries-old settlement patterns and the cultural geography they created have shaped today's most contentious policy debates and brought American democracy to the brink. Drawing on original, quantitative research conducted through Woodard's own think tank project, Nations Apart offers a fresh perspective on the issues most threatening our national cohesion, including:

Guns
Health
History
the History Wars
Abortion
Climate Change
Democracy
Authoritarianism

Blending groundbreaking original findings from commissioned polls and surveys with new cultural insights into our current reality, Nations Apart offers actionable strategies to bridge the rifts that divide us and points the way toward a more united nation.

Colin Woodard is director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. A POLITICO contributing editor, he was state and national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he received a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Chronicle of Higher Education, he has reported from more than 50 foreign countries and seven continents from postings in Budapest, Zagreb, Washington, D.C., and the U.S.-Mexico border and covered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and its bloody aftermath. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including The Economist, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek and Washington Monthly, and has been featured on CNN, the Rachel Maddow Show, Chuck Todd's The Daily Rundown, Katy Tur Reports, The PBS News Hour and NPR's Weekend Edition.
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Published 2025-11-04 by Viking Books

Comments

Woodard (Union: The Struggle To Forge the Story of United States Nationhood) discusses the fraught divisions that threaten the fabric of America's political and social landscape. This book has been released at a pivotal time in history, and it does an admirable job of providing empirical evidence on how the different regions of the country have developed, how they present today, and how they can be better united. One of the book's key points is how these different regions of states - grouped and named by the author for clarity - have differing viewpoints on the country's founding, yet still share overlap and commonality. Woodard presents a wealth of data on topics ranging from school violence to opinions on abortion and gun control, which can be overwhelming and somewhat disorienting. Still, he consistently brings the discussion back to explain how that data is relevant and how it is reflected in the culture. The book serves as a comprehensive history lesson, opening up avenues for further study and connecting with those who hail from any of the regions discussed.

Where American Nations was a map of our historical DNA, Nations Apart promises to be a diagnosis of our present and maybe a warning for the future.

A world-class intellectual. . . . [Colin Woodard's] research can help Americans rediscover their common identity in spite of all the attempts to divide them.

A lucid exercise in political geography with tremendousand disturbingexplanatory power.