As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the forces pulling the United States apart are perilous.  Colin Woodard, Director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University, examines the things that divide Americans – and the enduring unifying appeal of the Declaration of Independence.

Woodard – a New York Times bestselling historian and Polk Award-winning journalist – is one of the most respected authorities on North American regionalism, the sociology of United States nationhood, and how our colonial past shapes and explains the present. Compelling, dynamic and thought provoking, he offers a fascinating look at where America has come from, how we ended up as we are, and how we might shape our future. Author of the award-winning Wall Street Journal bestseller American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Woodard has written six books, including The Republic of Pirates– a New York Times bestselling history of Blackbeard’s pirate gang that was made into a primetime NBC series with John Malkovich and Claire Foye – and Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, which tells the harrowing story of the creation of the American myth in the 19th century, a story that reverberates in the news cycle today.

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.