Union a Finalist for a Maine Literary Award

I’m honored that my latest book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, has been named a finalist for the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Non-Fiction, an honor the other two books in the “series” also received. Competition will be fierce, though, as fellow Mainer Kerri Arsenault‘s Mill Town is among them.

The award is given by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, a worthy non-profit supporting the state’s literary community. The winners will be announced at this year’s (virtual) awards ceremony the evening of May 27.

For more on Union, visit the new webpage here. American Nations and American Character — which together with Union form an informal trilogy on United States nationhood and its myriad problems — won the award in 2012 and 2016 respectively.

 

Talking pirates with Press Herald Live, May 13, 7pm

For subscribers of the Portland Press Herald: I'll be talking with colleague Katherine Lee about the real pirates of the Caribbean, what it was like to write and research Republic of Pirates, and the experience of being an on-camera expert for Netflix's recent hit docudrama series "Lost Pirate Kingdom." Should be fun and I'll be answering audience questions as well.

The pandemic is still on so this is a virtual event. Good news is you don't have to travel, but you do need to subscribe. But, hey, if you do it's free and you get to support local journalism here in Maine. 

It all kicks off online this Thursday, May 13 at 7pm. Registration details here.

The Year of Living Distantly

We're one year into the global pandemic and I, at least, feel my heart rate increase when I think back to those scary days in late March and early April 2020 when nobody knew for sure what was going to happen next. Thankfully it appears clear we're at the beginning of the end, and we didn't end up living in The Road.

Among Americans, we Mainers have gotten off lightly, but it's still be a wrenching experience that will transform society. So for the anniversary of the pandemic I took stock in how the pandemic effected and changed different sectors of life, from the elderly who paid the most terrible price to schools, restaurants, hospitals, and the performing arts. You can read it all in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram, or online here.

Speaking on Maine's past, present and future at Maine Historical Society, Mar. 11

The pandemic messed with Maine's 200th anniversary celebrations last year, but the Maine Historical Society has rebooted their Bicentennial speaker series this winter and made it virtual. I'm pleased to be able to be their final speaker, offering my take on what the two centuries before and since statehood have meant for Maine and its people.

The event -- a conversation between MeHS executive director Steve Bromage and myself -- kicks off at 6pm on March 11. It's free to members -- though there's a limit of 500 attendees -- but you do need to register ahead of time. You can also become a member, of course, and enjoy the various other perks of doing so. (I've been one since I returned to Maine in 2003 while finishing work on my book on our state's history, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier.

For more on Maine's deep backstory, consider the book or my 2020 Press Herald series "Colony." I also wrote a bit about what his all means for the Boston Globe Opinion section.

Maine: Why the growing regional disconnect between vaccine need and supply?

In yesterday's Portland Press Herald I explored why the state's top public health official had to essentially do a two-minute advertisement to help the mass vaccination site in Bangor fill vaccination slots while the one serving the county with the largest number of still unvaccinated 70+ year olds continued to run under capacity for lack of vaccine.

The answer was surprising, in that that official -- Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Nirav Shah -- and the state's largest hospital network and operator of the southern Maine vaccine site -- have completely contradictory ones. Maine CDC says they continue to give large allocations of vaccine to the Bangor site while those in other parts of the state have huge waiting lists because the other sites don't have the capacity to take more. Not so, says MaineHealth, which says they have latent capacity and been begging for bigger supplies for some time, which Maine CDC isn't giving them.

As you'll see in the story, Shah intimates that MaineHealth hasn't demonstrated an ability to take more, likely an allusion to a scandal involving the vaccination of indelible workers.

For wider context on where Maine stands with the pandemic, consider this "step back and assess" feature I wrote on the last five and half months of the crisis.

COVID-19 continues its surge in Maine, stressing hospitals

Maine is fortunate to be doing better than almost any other state in the U.S. when it comes to containing the pandemic, but that isn't saying much. Over the past week Covid-19 has continued to surge here, with hospitals beginning to sound the alarm that their capacity and staff could be overwhelmed if the public doesn't redouble their efforts to slow the spread of the disease.

I have two recent stories in the Portland Press Herald covering the latest developments. 

The first, from Thursday's paper, looks at the state of capacity at the state's hospitals, which said they were holding their own by converting ordinary medical-surgical beds to ICU units to meet demand, though Maine Medical Center and Southern Maine Health Care Medical Center were both beginning to feel stress even then.

The second, from yesterday's print edition, provides an exclusive look at hospital-by-hospital Covid admissions and the trends over time. It shows a steep surge in recent days at MaineMed and record patient levels at most of the state's other major hospitals, including MaineGeneral, SMHC, and CMMC. Details herein.

New allegations against a Maine "medical supply" company led by man facing fraud indictments

It's Election Day 2020. Stay safe and, if you pray, do so for the survival of the American Experiment.

In my Maine reporting, I've been focused on the other crisis facing the world, the now-resurgent pandemic, and over the past few days I've been writing follow-ups on a story I broke in March about a Portland, Maine LLC headed by a man with a five-county criminal fraud indictment against him that had suddenly jumped into the medical supply business, trading in the shortage items desperately needed by hospitals and first responders.

Noble Partners, doing business as Noble Medical Supply, was the subject of my Portland Press Herald stories Friday and today, as allegations surfaced against the company and its founder Sean C. Grady. (Its customer-facing face is Diane Russell, former Democratic state legislator for Portland, who spoke at the 2016 DNC.) 

In Friday's story, news of a federal law suit against Noble and Grady in Florida; accusations of unreturned deposits for undelivered orders in Florida and California; a disgruntled sales representative and damaged masks in Texas; and, on the Internet, the company's website having been taken down by its provider and replaced with a demand for more than $15,000 in unpaid debts and a summary of Grady's legal problems in Maine and New Hampshire.

In today's story, the owner of a local Portland distillery lays out a story of a hand sanitizer production deal gone almost immediately bad, leaving his company out more than $150,000.

Separately, I also had this update on an uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations in Maine and the unusual geography of that uptick. And to round out pandemic-related news coverage, in case you missed it, there is also this in-depth profile of Maine "superspreader wedding" pastor Todd Bell from Sunday's paper.

I last wrote about Noble Partners at the end of March, when they delivered a van load of masks and other supplies to some customers in Massachusetts as promised.

More on politics and the election anon.

Coronavirus in Maine: a remarkably successful summer imperiled by defiant pastor's wedding

Maine managed to host a summer tourist season without epidemiological incidents, something of a miracle in and of itself and testimony to the commitment of Mainers and visitors alike to keeping Covid-19 in check. 

But a non-compliant wedding presided over by a defiant independent Baptist pastor is threatening to undo that progress, especially in York County, where it has spared outbreaks and where, perhaps not coincidentally, there's an oubtreak at said pastor's church and bible school. Public health experts I spoke to for this story in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram worry they may not be able to get the coronavirus genie back in the bottle.

Also in Saturday's Portland Press Herald I had this update on Covid hospitalization trends here in Maine.

An Online Event for UNION for Press Herald Subscribers, July 22

The Portland Press Herald is hosting a special event for subscribers: an online conversation between myself and Pulizter Prize-winning journalist and Press Herald digital editor Katherine Lee about Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.

Katherine and I will kick off at 7pm. Subscribers can register via the links at this article announcing the event. (Make sure to use the email address your subscription is under.)

Thanks for supporting local journalism. To support local business, consider purchasing Union from one of Maine's many great, likely struggling-with-the-pandemic, independent bookstores. At this writing, you can find signed copies at Sherman's (Portland and Freeport); Gulf of Maine Books (Brunswick); Longfellow Books (Portland); and River Run Books just over the border in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Talking Union with Maine Public radio's "Maine Calling"

On the eve of the launch of Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, it was a pleasure to be the guest on Maine Public radio's statewide interview and call-in program, "Maine Calling." I was the program's inaugural guest when it launched in 2011, when Keith Shortall and I talked about what was then my new book, American Nations.

You can hear the full show -- with host Jennifer Rooks -- online here. Thanks to all those who called in. I also spoke with local "Morning Edition" host Irwin Gratz earlier that morning.

Union goes on sale in stores across North America this morning, and I'll be the guest on a dozen radio shows across the United States, including Iowa Public Radio's "River to River" program at 9 Central, southern Louisiana NPR affiliate WKRF's "Talk Louisiana" at 9:45 Central, and Wisconsin Public Radio's Central Time" from 4 to 4:30 Central.

At 7pm, Maine's own Longfellow Books and the Maine Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance are hosting a virtual talk and signing at 7pm. You can register for the Zoom-driven event here, and can also order books in advance (or in real time) from Longfellow, now the city's oldest indie bookstore.

Other virtual events to follow, including with Washington D.C.'s Politics & Prose on June 28, where author and NPR veteran reporter Tom Gjelten will be interviewing me about Union (register here.)

Maine pandemic: zip-code data released; hospitalizations, testing updates

In this week of civil rights protests, police violence, and militarized deployments in major cities it's been hard to remember there's a deadly, once-in-a-century pandemic going on, but amazingly there is.

Here are a few developments I covered this week on the pandemic here in Maine.

Wednesday morning I reported on how Maine remains the only state in the country unable to compile negative testing data (and, thus, the positivity rate) each day, and why this is a problem. (It's an issue we've been covering for weeks.) Good news: later that day, the agency quietly updated its cumulative testing data for second day running - making it possible to subtract cases from the day before and calculate the rate. It also updated it Thursday and Friday, so it looks like it may have made good on promises to start reporting the data every day, though its not archived on their website and prior data hasn't yet been broken out by day. Stay tuned for a story on this.

Wednesday evening, the agency began reporting cumulative case counts by zip code for some parts of the state. My analysis was up at the Press Herald Thursday morning and notes that a zip code in Lewiston has the highest number of cases, one in downtown Portland has the highest prevalence; that Portland as a whole has the most cases, but only the fifth highest per capita load, and that the northern Maine town of Medway, of all places, has the highest per capita load of any municipality.

Our weekly update on Covid-19 hospitalizations-by-hospital was up on Friday and showed inpatient levels generally flat, except at the state's largest hospital, Maine Medical Center, where they fell dramatically from pandemic peak levels (c. 35/day) to 10, the lowest since March 24, when the crisis was just beginning in Maine. Story discusses why this is and updates recent county-level new case trends in southern Maine.

More to come. Thanks for reading, and if you value what this pretty small newspaper does, consider supporting it, so it can continue.

Covid hospitalizations return to peak levels in Southern Maine

The number of Covid-19 inpatients at Portland's major hospitals returned to the peak levels of early April last week, data collected directly from Maine's hospitals show. York County's largest hospital also saw increases.

The story -- the latest in my exclusive weekly Press Herald round-ups of the hospitalization situation in Maine -- follows weeks of steadily increasing Covid case counts in Cumberland and Androscoggin counties, suggesting the disease is having a resurgence as social distancing requirements are loosened. The upward case trends in these counties began before the Maine CDC increased testing and the hospitalization trends, of course, are not a product of how many tests were performed (which is why they are valuable to have.) York counties trends are also not encouraging, but Maine's other 13 counties looked relatively good, including Penobscot County (Bangor).

The story also includes an update on the promises the Maine CDC made last week in regards to releasing better data on the pandemic; short answer is they're still working on it.

The spike in hospitalizations in Portland -- now in its second week running -- followed more than a month of declining of flat cases in much of April and the beginning of May, when Gov. Janet Mills began the phased reopening of parts of Maine's (heavily damaged) economy.

Exclusive: pandemic appears resurgent in southern Maine

To kick off your Memorial Day weekend unpleasantly, I have this story in today's Portland Press Herald showing that Covid-19 has been having a clear resurgence in two of Maine's most populous counties, Cumberland (e.g.: Greater Portland) and Androscoggin (includes Lewiston-Auburn) and doesn't look out for the count by any means in York County, which is close to southern New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, which both have far higher prevalence of the disease than anywhere in Maine.

Talked to Maine CDC's director late Friday afternoon who agreed the weeks-long new case trends -- detailed in the article -- were worrisome and had started before Maine ramped up testing levels. Two top national experts said the state shouldn't be reopening these counties further until the new case counts were under control.

Also in today's paper, my weekly exclusive update on hospitalizations, hospital-by-hospital, day-by-day, show a sharp increase in Covid-19 inpatients at Portland's two major hospitals, Maine Medical Center and Mercy. (Curiously, CMMC in Lewiston did not have such a trend.)

Enjoy your weekend, but stay safe, wear masks when around people outside your bubble, and keep reading.

Maine and the medical supply chain amid the pandemic

Everyone in the Portland Press Herald newsroom is on a full-court press to cover the pandemic and I've been following supply chain issues this week.

In today's paper I have this feature on how Maine hospitals, first responders, and long-term care facilities are scrounging around for personal protection equipment to keep their personnel safe and able to help the rest of us. It also revealed that Maine has received no ventilators from the Strategic National Stockpile, and only about 20 percent of the N95 masks it asked for. There are concerns that political and presidential criteria might be involved in the allocations FEMA is making to states as the cornavirus wave begins to crest across the country.

Earlier I had two stories on a pop-up Portland based medical supplier that's taken orders for millions of masks as well as Cover-19 tests and other highly sought after medical items. It turns out the owner of the firm is facing a five-count criminal indictment for securities fraud, theft by deception, and trading securities without a license and owes New Hampshire nearly a quarter million dollars in restitution and fees in a related case. But the firm -- whose public face is former Maine legislator Diane Russell -- drove a rented van to New Jersey over the weekend to collect 20,000 of the masks and deliver them to customers in eastern Massachusetts. 

Also last week I had this explainer on why the Maine CDC is only identifying coronavirus cases by county, not town.

Stay safe out there, watch out for each other, and wash your hands.

Colony, the Press Herald Maine Bicentennial series, concludes

With the world facing the biggest social, economic, and epidemiological crisis in at least two generations, I neglected to post the final two installments of "Colony," my six part Maine Sunday Telegram series on the backstory of Maine statehood and the lasting legacy of those (colonial) experiences.

The last two installments ran one and two weeks ago respectively and you can find the whole series on the Colony landing page over at the Press Herald.

Thanks to the incredible number of readers who wrote -- and continue to write -- with kind words about the series and what it meant to them. The most common question: will it be released as a mini-book? The answer is "I don't think so" -- the pandemic is drawing all the paper's resources -- but you can find most of these themes (and much, much more) in my 2004 book on the cultural and environmental history of Maine, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier. 

Also, if you missed our 29-part series on Maine-Passamaquoddy relations, "Unsettled," it is indeed available as an e-book as well as free online to subscribers. I hope it brings some distraction to all of you bunkered down in the middle of this crisis.

Maine company taking orders for masks, Covid-19 tests, but its leader is facing criminal fraud indictments

Last week, the Boston Globe reported that a Maine company represented by former Portland legislator Diane Russell had reached out to Massachusetts officials and was supplying nearly a million urgently needed N95 respirators to firefighters, hospitals and other entities, as well as Covid-19 tests and other medical supplies in short supply.

In today's Portland Press Herald, I explored the backstory of the company, whose leader turns out to be facing a five count criminal indictment here in Maine for theft by deception, securities fraud, and selling securities without a license. He also owes New Hampshire over a quarter million dollars in restitution and fees in a related matter.

For details, please read the story, which I'll be following-up on.

[Update, 3/31/20: I have a follow-up story in today's paper which reports on how Russell drove a van to a New Jersey warehouse to collect a shipment of masks and then, on the way home to Maine, dropped parcels off with customers in Massachusetts.]

Also, if you value your local newspaper's pandemic coverage and want it to continue, subscribe. Advertising revenue is cratering and many papers are being forced to layoff reporters and close editions. Like many papers, the Press Herald is providing its coronavirus coverage for free, but that doesn't mean it isn't costing a lot to produce it.

Stay safe, wash your hands, and look out for one another.

Stacey Abrams, in Maine, urges fight against voter suppression

Stacey Abrams, the Georgia legislator who narrowly lost a controversial gubernatorial race in 2018 to the man who organized the state's voter purge, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, was in Portland last week, speaking at the University of New England on the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr. day.

She got into the race after spending years organizing to turn out African-American, Latino, and young voters and boosted their turnout massively. Meanwhile Kemp was engaging in what she describes as voter suppression, a challenge to democracy she urged the audience -- which included Gov. Janet Mills -- to help confront.

Read about it my story for the Portland Press Herald.

Speaking on history of immigration in Maine, Portland, Jan. 18

Portland Ovations is convening a panel discussion on the history of immigration in Maine on January 18th at the Maine Historical Society in Portland, and I'm pleased to be taking part. It kicks off at 1pm and is free and open to the public.

Here's the description from Portland Ovations:

When we talk about immigration to Maine, we start with white settler-colonialism. What has been the impact of immigration on Maine’s land and people from the first French explorers in 1604 to the present? What are the drivers of recent immigration movements, and how does each new wave shift Maine’s economy and culture? What specific challenges do Maine’s environment and population pose for new arrivals; and how do we support Maine’s first peoples?

**PANELISTS**

- Tilly Laskey, Curator of 'Holding Up The Sky' and Native art and culture specialist at, Maine Historical Society
- Alain Nahimana, Executive Director, The Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center
- Maulian Dana, Tribal Ambassador, Penobscot Nation
- Colin Woodard, Journalist, Author of American Nations and The Lobster Coast
- Moderator, Linda Nelson, Deputy Director, Portland Ovations and Bowdoin College graduate in American Studies.

In Maine, study finds cruise ship passengers spend about half as much as previously claimed

Last year, I wrote a series for the Portland Press Herald exploring how Maine communities can balance the costs and benefits of cruise ship tourism, an issue that had already exploded into public controversies in Bar Harbor, Rockland, and several smaller ports.

One focal point was how much cruise ship passengers actually spend ashore, particularly in Portland, where the only existing study was rather a mess, probably inflating the numbers by 100 percent.

That issue came up again this month with the release of a state-sponsored study of passenger spending that found each spent not $109 to $110, but rather $61-and-change. I wrote about this in Monday's Press Herald, with reaction from municipal officials and response from the state's cruise industry office and the author of the previous studies in Maine. Hope you enjoy.

Sinclair directs local TV stations across the country, including Maine's WGME, to promote Trump campaign merch

Sinclair Broadcasting, the conservative Maryland-based company that's the largest owner of local television stations in the country, this month directed its stations to publish "news articles" promoting Trump campaign merchandise.

The articles, which were published and promoted (via Tweets) by Maine's WGME-13, have no sources and read much like a product catalog entry. Some stations linked directly to the Trump campaign's internet store product pages. Proceeds from campaign merchandise sales are used to fund the political campaign. I reported about this in Tuesday's Portland Press Herald.

It's not the first media ethics controversy involving Sinclair and WGME. I wrote about a scripted spot attacking alleged "fake news" broadcast by other news organizations last fall.