Analyzing Trump's victory via American Nations on WNPR

Donald Trump will be inaugurated president tomorrow, and if you're still contemplating how it happened, you might check out my interview with WNPR's NEXT, a weekly show about New England.

The conversation is about my American Nations-powered analysis of the 2016 election posted over at the Portland Press Herald, wherein the Greater New England cultural space plays a pivotal role. (If you're in a hurry, scroll down to the "Rural Yankees Defect" segment.)

The full interview is up online. If you live in or near New England, you can also hear it on your public radio station (unless you live in Boston itself, in which case you're out of luck.) Here's the schedule:

WNPR / Connecticut Public Radio: Sunday at 6pm.

Maine Public Radio: Friday at 2 pm. [May be pre-empted by inauguration.]

WNHH (New Haven): Saturday at 8 am.

New Hampshire Public Radio: Saturday at 10 pm.

New England Public Radio: Sunday at 10 pm.

Vermont Public Radio: Sunday at noon.

Enjoy. And thanks again to NEXT for having me on again. (We last spoke for their very first program last year, when we talked about the origins of New England culture.)

Talking New England identity with WNPR's NEXT

WNPR, the Hartford-based flagship of Connecticut Public Radio, has launched a new show on New England. NEXT, which will roll out under the auspices of public radio's New England reporting collaborative, will eventually be syndicated throughout the region.

I was very pleased to be a part of their inaugural episode, talking about the origins of New England's identity, its expansion across a swath of the continent, and the conflicts it has with neighboring cultures, like the Dutch-founded region around what is now New York City, or the Scots-Irish influenced Greater Appalachian region. Readers of American Nations, American Character, and Lobster Coast will recognize much of what we spoke about.

The episode premiered on the stations of Connecticut public radio on Thursday afternoon and is available online now. (My segment starts at 19:20.) It also airs:

On New Hampshire Public Radio today, Aug. 6, at 10 pm.

On Vermont Public Radio Sunday, Aug. 7, at noon.

On the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network again Sunday, Aug. 7, at 6 pm.

Thanks to producer Andrea Muraskin and host John Dankosky for having me on.

Talking American Character, Greenwich, CT, Mar. 21

For all of you in the northern swath of New Netherland: I'll be speaking about my new book American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good at the Greenwich Library in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The event kicks off at 7pm at the library, 101 West Putnam Avenue. It's free and open to the public.

The book tour this month also includes in Portsmouth, NH; Newburyport, Boston, Falmouth and Beverly, Massachusetts; Portland, Maine (twice); and Washington, DC.

[Update, 3/14/16: Here's a preview of the talk from the Greenwich Time.]

On pirates in Connecticut, Britain, and video games

The golden age pirates, the subject of my third book, The Republic of Pirates, are returning to the zeitgeist with gusto. Yes, there's the NBC series based on the book coming in February, with Neil Cross writing the script and John Malkovich playing Blackbeard, but that's not all. Consider:

There's a worldwide publicity drive afoot for the new Assassin's Creed video game release, Black Flag, which is also set among the Golden Age Pirates. This week, The Telegraph of India interviewed the game's chef scriptwriter, Darby McDevitt, who kindly plugged Republic of Pirates: "Colin’s book provided us with the answer to one crucial question we had –– how do we get all of the most famous pirates in history together in the same story? It turns out that The Republic of Pirates was the answer." (For more on the golden age pirates, enjoy my recent Game Informer interview.)

Meanwhile, UK's PanMacMillan has revealed the forthcoming publication of the UK and Commonwealth edition of Republic of Pirates. The release date is set for January 2014, just ahead of NBC's "Crossbones." As is often the case in Britain, it's going straight to paperback, retailing for just £8.99, or about the annual wages of an ordinary sailor in 1715. (Thank you, inflation.)

Examiner.com, an online sweatshop for freelance writers, today named "Crossbones" one of the "top five promising premises for the fall tv season", which is even more impressive given that it's a mid-season replacement, so not out in the fall at all. "Old ‘Blackbeard’ is played by the incomparable John Malkovich," the writer notes. "‘Nuff said." I'd actually add a bit about writer Neil Cross being the creator of BBC's crime drama "Luther" too, but point taken.

Finally -- and unrelated to any of the above -- The Hartford Courant ran this piece on pirates in Connecticut and approaches, drawing heavily from an interview I did with them earlier this year.