Hello friends, welcome!

So excited to have you joining me today because this conversation is, whoa, I am chatting

today with Colin Woodard, who is the director of the nationhood lab at Salve Regina University

and we are going to have a very, very fascinating conversation about the cultural regions of

the United States and how that relates to topics like gun violence today.

You are not going to want to miss this one, so let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting.

I am very excited to be chatting with Colin Woodard today.

Thank you so much for being here.

I have a lot of questions, so thanks for agreeing to do this.

And I look forward to it.

One of the things that I have found really interesting about your work is about sort of

the geographical history of the United States, which is in and of itself, even if you didn't

extrapolate any modern topics about it, would still be really interesting.

But I've been reading with great interest some of your more recent work about the geographical

differences related to gun violence in the United States.

And I know that people who are listening to this care a lot about gun violence, they

care a lot about protecting their rights, but they also care a lot about making sure

that children are safe in school and things of that nature.

One of the great American questions is how do you balance the rights of the individual

versus the rights of the society as a whole.

But I would love to start Colin with a discussion about American nations, a history of the 11

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