I greatly enjoyed being an on-camera expert for Netflix's hit docudrama series "Lost Pirate Kingdom," which essentially tells the story of the Golden Age pirate gang related in my 2007 work of history, The Republic of Pirates.
But how accurate was the six-part series, which has reignited interest in Blackbeard and his peers in the Flying Gang?
I wrote up my thoughts on that over at Talking Points Memo. Hope you enjoy it and the series.
Netflix's new historical docudrama story on the Caribbean pirates, "Lost Pirate Kingdom," came out Tuesday and is already a hit, standing at #3 of all titles on Netflix's US site, #4 for them in the UK and #1 in Denmark.
It essentially tells the story I revealed in my 2007 work of history The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and The Man Who Brought Them Down, and I appear throughout as one of their taking head experts. But the voice of the show is Derek Jacobi, appropriately enough, the actor who played the aging Duke of Windsor in The Crown, among other roles.
Hope you enjoy the six-episode series. For more on the real story of Blackbeard and his gang, do consider the book, which is also available in UK and Danish editions.
Maine turned 200 this year, but the Bicentennial celebrations were cancelled by the pandemic, with Gov. Mills spending the official birthday, March 15, advising Mainers to lockdown to prevent the spread of the then barely understood coronavirus.
I wrote a six-part series for the Maine Sunday Telegram on statehood's meaning that wrapped up just as Covid-19 spread into the state back in March, but I also wanted to present some key points to an external audience, one in Massachusetts in particular for reasons readers of The Lobster Coast will quickly ascertain. So in this week's Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section, I had this essay on Maine's experience as a colony of a colony, how it shaped our culture and people, and the ways in which the pandemic and other global developments may shake up the postcolonial trajectory my native state has long been on. Hope you enjoy.
This is my first byline in the Globe, but in September I spoke to Ideas staff writer David Sharfenberg about the battle for the national "soul" of the U.S., the topic of my most recent book, Union.
Update, 10/30/20: Bloomberg's Boston bureau has a radio show and podcast, Bloomberg Baystate Business, and hosts Tom Moroney and Joe Shortsleeve kindly had me on the show today to talk about the phenomena described in the Globe piece. My portion starts at 0:50:32.
My thanks to the Christian Science Monitor's book reviewers for naming Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood as a Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020.
The Monitor's review of the book can be found here. It concludes: "The stakes are nothing short of determining how a nation thinks about itself, how it teaches posterity about itself. In “Union,” that battle sprawls out of the narrow confines of academia and embroils the entire country – and the fight is ongoing."
Also pleased to share the list with friend Arial Sabar, who also had a book out this year, and a former source when I was focused on the oceans beat, Caro Safina.
For more on Union, start here.
Over at the New York Times Book Review today, Fareed Zakaria -- whose ideas about illiberal democracy were very helpful in my thinking through some of the concepts in American Character -- was asked what four books he recommended for this political moment in America.
Here's his answer:
"Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized,” which gets at the state of our politics. Colin Woodard’s “American Nations,” which gets at the cultural divides. Samuel Huntington’s “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony,” because it places the current moment in historical context. And Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” because it is still the best book ever written about this country."
That's some company to be in. Thanks much, Fareed!
The rest of the world is trying to understand what's going on with the United States and its (currently not quite resolved) election.
So I very much enjoyed sharing the backstory (via the American Nations - American Character - Union trilogy) with CBC-Nova Scotia this morning for their longform Mainstreet program. It broadcast today, but can also be heard as a podcast here.
Last week I spoke with CBC-New Brunswick (about Maine's role) and Denmark's Zetland Magasin about the grand American backstory.
Hope you're all getting more sleep than I am. But if you live in the United States, I very much doubt it.
The world is watching as the U.S. staggers towards the highest stakes election since the 1870s Tuesday, and some reporters have been drawn to American Nations, American Character, Union and even The Lobster Coast for an explanation as to what is going on. Two stories came out yesterday.
Denmark's Zetland Magasin has this longform feature on American Nations and how it explains what's going on in this country. I enjoyed speaking with editor Jakob Moll and seeing my work rendered in Danish, the language of an eighth of my ancestors. Ny Holland! Det dybe sud! Great stuff.
Friday's Le Monde carried this feature on the disunited States, with a nice name drop (in excellent company) for my latest book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. There are some scenes that take place in Paris, so perhaps a few readers there will discover the book.
On Monday, CBC-New Brunswick broadcast their story on Maine's second district, the topic of this post here at World Wide Woodard.
Not surprisingly, the outside world is paying a great deal of attention to our pending election. An additional data point: I did interviews back-to-back Monday with journalists in Denmark and Canada about separate aspects of the cultural and political context for 2020.
The first of those interviews, with CBC-New Brunswick, is included in today's radio/text/television story on Maine's Second District, its politics, its differences with the First District, and its potentially decisive role in Tuesday's vote, as there's a scenario (however unlikely) under which its single electoral vote breaks a 269-269 Electoral College tie. Add in the race between Senator Susan Collins and his Democratic rival, former Maine House speaker Sarah Gideon, and there's a lot at stake.
Also, in a scene out of Cold War Berlin or Vienna, reporter, Jacques Poitras also interviews an American voter live across the closed border on the bridge connecting tiny Forest City, Maine (Population: 5) and Forest City, New Brunswick. It's fitting as Poitras is also the author of Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border, about our federations' shared frontier.
Discover Magazine reported on a recent study on the relationship between topography and personality, and reached out to me for my thoughts on the causes of observed differences between the regions. Needless to say, I argued culture -- not topography -- was the more determinative force at work.
Read on to the article by writer Sophie Putka for the details. And for more on Frederick Jackson Turner's dead end, check out Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.
Had an enjoyable conversation last week with Monmouth College political scientist Robin Johnson about the story told in Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood for his "Heartland Politics" radio show and podcast.
The show now airs on WVIK, the NPR affiliate for the Quad Cities on Iowa/Illinois border: Davenport, Moline, Rock Island, and Bettendorf and our conversation can be heard here.
The Quad Cities are classic Midlands country, in American Nations terms, and even have a cameo in Union, when the historian George Bancroft, former President Millard Filmore and a crowd of dignitaries arrive in Rock Island in 1854 as part of a junket sponsored by the new Chicago and Rock Island Railroad. They meet a non-descript railroad attorney during a Springfield, Ill. whistle stop on their way home and pay him no mind. They guy's name was Abraham Lincoln.
But I digress. Please: enjoy the show.
I was last on air in Iowa this summer on Iowa Public Radio's River to River and was on Robin's show back when it was still hosted on KBUR just across the Mississippi -- thus the change from "K" to "W" in call letters -- to talk about what American Nations had to say about the state of US politics.
As the highest-stakes U.S. election since 1860 fast approaches, various news outlets have been using American Nations to explain how things got so bad. Most interesting for me is when they use the book to analyze their own backyards, especially when those places are far from where I live.
Two cases in point over the past 48 hours:
The editor-in-chief of Alabama Political Reporter, Bill Britt, wrote this OpEd about the state of his state, using the observations I made about the Deep Southern social and political legacy. "Today, Alabama’s governance framework and, to a lesser degree, its society is much like the Deep South characteristics Woodard describes," Britt writes. "One Party rule. A dominant religion. A racial caste system. And a willingness to impose regulations on personal behavior while opposing almost every economic restrictions."
To the north, Chicago Magazine has this feature using American Nations to explain why Illinois -- or at least it's dominant northern tier -- votes like New England. "In Lincoln’s day, New England-settled northern Illinois was the most anti-slavery part of the state," writer Eric McClellan argues. "Today, it’s the reason that Illinois votes more like a coastal state than most of its Midwestern neighbors."
And, separately, Jeff Daniels gave a shout out to my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood in this interview with AV Club. (He previously touted American Nations too.) Thanks, Jeff!
Nearly 100 million eligible U.S. voters chose not to exercise the franchise. Why not? What can be done to change that? Who would they vote for if they participated?
These are among the questions I explored for POLITICO earlier this year, when the Knight Foundation released the largest ever study of American non-voters. And yesterday I joined National Public Radio's "1A" program to discuss what I learned and why it matters.
You can hear the full show -- which is produced at WAMU in Washington, DC -- via this link. Guests include Emory University's Bernard Fraga and Kat Calvin of Spread the Vote.
Callers asked about Ranked Choice Voting and I mentioned a bit about the experience here in Maine, which adopted it for federal elections before the 2018 midterms. Here's another POLITICO story I wrote about that.
It was a pleasure speaking with the Boston Globe's David Scharfenberg last week about the struggle over the soul of the United States between defining ourselves by our ideals and doing so by way of preferred bloodlines -- the topic of my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.
The story lead the Ideas section of Sunday's Globe and can be found online here. I hope you'll check it out.
Last week I also spoke to the New Yorker's Robin Wright for this essay.
Almost a decade ago I posited, in the epilogue of American Nations, that the United States is vulnerable to dissolution. We're an unwieldy federation of rival regional cultures, many of which disagree on the fundamentals: What does freedom mean? Are we committed to the civic national promises in the Declaration of Independence? What is the correct balance between church and state, between individual liberty and the common good?
"Faced with a major crisis," I wrote, it was possible "the edition's leaders will betray their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the primary adhesive holding the union together. In the midst of, say, a deadly pandemic or the destruction of several cities by terrorists, a fearful public might condone the suspension of civil rights, the dissolution of Congress, or the incarceration of Supreme Court justices." Some "nations" might be happy with this situation, others opposed. Without the constitution, they break their bonds. Some readers thought this possibility sounded crazy in 2011, even as a long-term proposition. Not so many do now.
Today we enter a presidential election in the midst of a global pandemic with the central question before us being: do we want to live in that civic nationalist republic or in a white supremacist ethno-state? Do we want to live in a western democracy or in under an authoritarian regime? We've been asked this before -- it's the story told in my new book, Union -- and it's this suite of questions that are now being asked every day.
That's what lead me to be a central source for this Robin Wright New Yorker essay, which posted yesterday, entitled "Is America a myth?" To survive, Wright concludes, America is going to have to move beyond myth.
On September 1 at 10:30 Eastern (4:30 CET), I'll be speaking with the German Marshall Fund's executive vice president, Derek Chollet about Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood as part of GMF's ongoing (and, now, virtual) author series.
The event is free and open to the public, but you do need to register.
[Update, 9/17/20: Thanks to all who attended -- and there were a lot of you from both sides of the Atlantic! The talk is up on YouTube here.]
Here's the invite from GMF, who I thank for hosting this event:
ONLINE EVENT
Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood
A Book Talk with Colin Woodard
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. EDT | 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. CET
Colin Woodard
State and National Affairs Writer, Portland Press Herald
Derek Chollet
Executive Vice President, GMF
The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) is pleased to invite you to a virtual book talk with bestselling author, historian, and journalist Colin Woodard. His latest book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, describes the 19th century effort to create and propagate a national narrative for the U.S. that could unite its disparate regional cultures, a project that quickly became a battle between civic and ethnic nationalist visions for the young federation. Join Woodard and GMF Executive Vice President Derek Chollet as they discuss how the belief that the United States was or should be an American Anglo-Saxon ethnostate has confounded the country's efforts to achieve its civic ideals and continues to affect its political landscape and fundamental stability today.
If you have any questions, please contact Itai Barsade at ibarsade@gmfus.org.
Please consider supporting independent book sellers by buying a copy at bookshop.org if you are based in the United States.
The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) strengthens transatlantic cooperation on regional, national, and global challenges and opportunities in the spirit of the Marshall Plan.
Colin Woodard, a New York Times bestselling author and historian, is the state and national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald, where he received a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and the San Francisco Chronicle, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and six continents.
Derek Chollet is executive vice president and senior advisor for security and defense policy at GMF. Before joining GMF, he served as U.S. assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and held a number of senior positions at the White House and U.S. State Department. His forthcoming book is The Middle Way: How Three Presidents Shaped America’s Role in the World.
I recently sat down, virtually, with Diana DePasquale, instructor and doctoral candidate in American Studies at Bowling Green State University, to discuss my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood for, appropriately enough, the New Books Network podcast.
How do we hold the United States together? How did we do it in the past? Where did our story of national purpose, self-definition, and origins come from? All the answers herein.
The episode is now available over at Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
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