- A New Republic Best Book of the Year - The Globalist Top Books of the Year - Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction

Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven nations that continue to shape North America

According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.

An entrancing tale of piracy colored with gold, treachery and double-dealing (Portland Press Herald), Pulitzer Prize-finalist Colin Woodward's The Republic of Pirates is the historical biography of the exploits of infamous Caribbean buccaneers.

In the early eighteenth century, the Pirate Republic was home to some of the great pirate captains, including Edward Blackbeard Teach, Black Sam Bellamy, and Charles Vane. Along with their fellow pirates -- former sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves -- this Flying Gang established a crude but distinctive democracy in the Bahamas, carving out their own zone of freedom in which servants were free, blacks could be equal citizens, and leaders were chosen or deposed by a vote.

They cut off trade routes, sacked slave ships, and severed Europe from its New World empires. For a brief, glorious period the Republic was a success as the pirates became heroes in the eyes of the people.

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Britain and the Americas, award-winning author Colin Woodard tells the dramatic untold story of the Pirate Republic that shook the very foundations of the British and Spanish Empires and fanned the democratic sentiments that would one day drive the American revolution.

A thorough and engaging history of Maine's rocky coast and its tough-minded people.--Boston Herald

A] well-researched and well-written cultural and ecological history of stubborn perseverance.--USA Today

For more than four hundred years the people of coastal Maine have clung to their rocky, wind-swept lands, resisting outsiders' attempts to control them while harvesting the astonishing bounty of the Gulf of Maine. Today's independent, self-sufficient lobstermen belong to the communities imbued with a European sense of ties between land and people, but threatened by the forces of homogenization spreading up the eastern seaboard.

In the tradition of William Warner's Beautiful Swimmers, veteran journalist Colin Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) traces the history of the rugged fishing communities that dot the coast of Maine and the prized crustacean that has long provided their livelihood. Through forgotten wars and rebellions, and with a deep tradition of resistance to interference by people from away, Maine's lobstermen have defended an earlier vision of America while defying the tragedy of the commons--the notion that people always overexploit their shared property. Instead, these icons of American individualism represent a rare example of true communal values and collaboration through grit, courage, and hard-won wisdom.

The author of American Nations examines the history of and solutions to the key American question: how best to reconcile individual liberty with the maintenance of a free society

The struggle between individual rights and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of nearly every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agendas of the Federalists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party. In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these two key strands in American politics through the four centuries of the nation's existence, from the first colonies through the Gilded Age, Great Depression and the present day, and he explores how different regions of the country have successfully or disastrously accommodated them. The independent streak found its most pernicious form in the antebellum South but was balanced in the Gilded Age by communitarian reform efforts; the New Deal was an example of a successful coalition between communitarian-minded Eastern elites and Southerners.

Woodard argues that maintaining a liberal democracy, a society where mass human freedom is possible, requires finding a balance between protecting individual liberty and nurturing a free society. Going to either libertarian or collectivist extremes results in tyranny. But where does the sweet spot lie in the United States, a federation of disparate regional cultures that have always strongly disagreed on these issues? Woodard leads readers on a riveting and revealing journey through four centuries of struggle, experimentation, successes and failures to provide an answer. His historically informed and pragmatic suggestions on how to achieve this balance and break the nation's political deadlock will be of interest to anyone who cares about the current American predicament--political, ideological, and sociological.

A Christian Science Monitor best book of 2020

Relentlessly accessible. . . . This is that rare history that tells what influential thinkers failed to think, what famous writers left unwritten.
--Jill Leovy, The American Scholar

By the bestselling author of American Nations, the story of how the myth of U.S. national unity was created and fought over in the nineteenth century--a myth that continues to affect us today

Union tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge an American nationhood. On one hand, a small group of individuals--historians, political leaders, and novelists--fashioned and promoted the idea of America as nation that had a God-given mission to lead humanity toward freedom, equality, and self-government. But this emerging narrative was swiftly contested by another set of intellectuals and firebrands who argued that the United States was instead the homeland of the allegedly superior Anglo-Saxon race, upon whom divine and Darwinian favor shined.

Colin Woodard tells the story of the genesis and epic confrontations between these visions of our nation's path and purpose through the lives of the key figures who created them, a cast of characters whose personal quirks and virtues, gifts and demons shaped the destiny of millions.

The Black Sea is already dead. Because of sea-level rise, an entire nation in the South Pacific, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, is being washed away. Throughout the Caribbean Sea, vast stretches of coral reef-called the rainforests of the ocean because of their diversity of life-are dying at increasingly rapid rates. The reefs along the entire north coast of Jamaica are dead. Ocean's End is not about the damage our oceans could suffer (and inflict) in ten or a hundred years, if we're not careful. It's an eyewitness account, in compelling and vivid detail, of the massive worldwide destruction that's already happened.

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 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 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.