SWAGƵ Center for Global Humanities presents Colin Woodard’s “Uniting a Divided America” in fall lecture series
As we live through one of the most polarizing periods of American history since the Civil War and hurtle toward a presidential election some have framed as a referendum on democracy itself, authoritarianism continues to gain momentum around the globe. And the ideals laid forth in our Declaration of Independence continue to face a sustained attack by an expanding illiberal movement rooted in the darker corners of our national past.
But all hope is not lost. There is still time for pro-democracy forces from across the partisan spectrum to preserve and perfect our American republic.
This is the argument Colin Woodard will make when he visits the SWAGƵ Center for Global Humanities to present a lecture titled “Uniting a Divided America” at 6 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 23, at the SWAGƵ Portland Campus for the Health Sciences.
One of the nation’s leading authorities on North American regionalism, Woodard describes how the United States has become unraveled—putting the continued survival of the republic in jeopardy. There has never been one America, Woodard argues, but several Americas, each with its own, centuries-old ideals, values, and religious and cultural heritage. Tensions between these regional cultures have fractured our balkanized federation and, in recent decades, created the conditions for the collapse of our liberal democratic experiment, Woodard contends. It is imperative, he says, that we heal our battered union before it’s too late.
Woodard is the director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, which delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand and defeat the forces undermining it. He is the New York Times bestselling author of six books including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America; American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good; and Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. As such, he is a leading authority on North American regionalism and the challenges to constructing and maintaining a U.S. peoplehood.
A longtime foreign correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, Woodard covered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, ethnic conflict in the Balkans, war crimes trials in The Hague, and climate change in the Antarctic. He has covered Congress, the rise and fall of an authoritarian-minded populist governor, and the struggles of Maine’s indigenous people to secure rights enjoyed by all the other federally recognized tribes.
While a staff writer at the Portland Press Herald , he won a George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his six-part series that examined the impact of climate change on the Gulf of Maine. His work has been featured by CNN, the BBC World Service, MSNBC, PBS News Hour, NPR, The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Politico.
This will be the first of five events this fall at the Center for Global Humanities, where lectures are always free, open to the public, and streamed live online. A welcome reception will be held from 5 to 6 p.m. in Innovation Hall, and a Q&A will follow the lecture. For more information, please visit:
