Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America

by Colin Woodard

Overview

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 political polarization, economic inequality, public health crises, and democratic collapse, we must examine the country’s longstanding regional divides. In Nations Apart, Colin Woodard—an 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 university-based think tank project, Nations Apart offers a fresh perspective on the issues most threatening our national cohesion, including:

• Guns
• Health
• Immigration
• 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593833407
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Colin Woodard, a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist, is director of Nationhood Lab Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. A longtime foreign correspondent, he reported from more than 50 countries on seven continents and, as an investigative reporter at Maine’s Portland Press Herald, won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian, and dozens of other major publications. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he lives in Maine.