Launching UNION virtually June 16 with Longfellow Books and MWPA

Despite the pandemic, my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, goes on sale this coming Tuesday, June 16 and the good folks at Longfellow Books up here in Portland, Maine and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance are hosting a virtual talk and signing at 7pm that evening.

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.

I'll talk a little about the book and how I came to write it, open up to questions from all of you, and (afterward) sign and/or personalize copies from anyone who purchases them. (The store will them ship them to you.)

For some prepub reviews of Union, check out this post (Library Journal, American Scholar) and this one (Kirkus, Booklist.)

I'll also be doing virtual events with Gibson's Bookstore of Concord, New Hampshire on June 24 (at 6pm, details here) and with Washington D.C.'s Politics and Prose on June 28, where author and NPR veteran reporter Tom Gjelten will be interviewing me about Union (register here.)

A few additional programming notes to kick off next week:

Mainers: I'll also be your guest Monday, June 15 on Maine Public radio's "Maine Calling," from 1 to 2pm Eastern.

Iowans: Catch me on Iowa Public Radio's "River to River" on June 16 from 9 to 9:30 Central.

Louisiana peeps: I'm on Baton Rouge NPR affiliate WKRF's "Talk Louisiana" at 9:45 Central on June 16

Wisconsiners: I'll be your guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Central Time" from 4 to 4:30 pm that same day, June 16.

Library Journal and the American Scholar on Union, my forthcoming book

Amazingly, the calendar says its just nine days until my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, goes in sale. Book tour, as conventionally understood, has been largely cancelled by the ongoing pandemic, though there will be several virtual events and maybe even a couple of socially distanced outdoor in person ones. But there are some more early reviews.

Library Journal -- the trade publication of American libraries founded by Melil Dewey of Dewey decimal system fame -- gave Union a starred review, my first from them since my first book, Ocean's End, twenty years ago. Reviewer Michael Farrell writes: "Woodard is a gifted historiographer, and this excellent work will be appreciated by anyone interested in American history and how it came to be written." The review is currently not paywalled and found here.

In The American Scholar -- the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society -- Jill Levoy of the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy wrote the first feature length review of the book, and it's one that's made my publisher very happy. "Beginning with the simplicity of fable, Union quickly builds into a surprisingly complex work of intellectual history," Levoy writes. "Woodard... shows just how powerful a form popular nonfiction can be in the hands of a disciplined writer who won’t tolerate generality or abstraction. Union moves quickly, skipping from one anecdote to the next. The lens is narrow. Physical detail is prominent. The writing is relentlessly accessible." Unfortunately, it's currently paywalled, unless you subscribe.

Union is available at socially distanced bookstores everywhere June 16.

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.

Early reviews of Union, my forthcoming book

Looking at the calendar, I realize the on sale date for my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, is less than a month away. While the in-person book tour is pretty much cancelled by the ongoing pandemic, there have been the early reviews, and this seems as good a time to share them.

Publisher's Weekly says Union is "a fluid narrative that manages to make abstract intellectual concepts tangible. This enlightening and character-driven account will resonate with progressive
history buffs." (The reviewer also says "Woodard oversells his argument by treating pride in the nation’s constitutional legacy as historically discrete from pride in America’s cultural heritage," a sentence I've been scrutinizing for the better part of a month and still have no idea what they are talking about in the context of this book...but I digress.)

Kirkus calls it "Sturdy American history" and says "Woodard manages to bring all of his disparate biographical threads together in a coherent narrative, using as his apotheosis the life of Woodrow Wilson, Southern-born writer of his own Anglo Saxon–centered History of the American People and proponent of D.W. Griffith’s white supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915)."

I hope you'll consider reading it. More details as pub date approaches. Union is available for preorder,  with links to various retailers from Penguin-Random House's page for it.

[Update, 6/7/20: Two more early reviews out now from Library Journal and The American Scholar.]

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 CDC to improve its pandemic data reporting

Over the past couple of months, I've reported on a variety of shortcomings in the way the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention collects and/or shares data on the pandemic, from early problems keeping track of ICU bed capacity to being the only state in New England to not report cases by town and the only state in the entire Union incapable of calculating and reporting full test results (and positivity rates) daily.

As I reported in today's print edition of the Portland Press Herald, the agency has taken steps to improve and increase the data it shares and has promised to soon start releasing daily testing data and make even town-level case information. Details in the story.