Colin Woodard-UNION: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood

In his popular book, American Nations, award-winning journalist Colin Woodard argued for the existence of 11 separate stateless nations within the United States, where rival cultures explain history, identity, and voting behaviors. With his new book, UNION: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (Viking), Woodard expands on a theme from Nations: how the cherished idea of a unified country has ignored the basic facts of our history. In this fascinating study of a fractured America, he examines how the myth of our national unity was created and fought over by five men—George Bancroft, William Gilmore Simms, Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Jackson Turner—and how it continues to affect us today. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Colin Woodard is a New York Times bestselling writer, historian, and journalist who has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and six continents. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and The San Francisco Chronicle, he is a reporter at the Portland Press Herald, where he received a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and Politico. He is the author of American Nations, American Character, The Lobster Coast, The Republic of Pirates, and Ocean's End and lives in Maine.