Talking UNION with Texas Public Radio, Northeast Public Radio

Happy Fourth of July everyone, a day when we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence because, yes, it's our founding document. (The 1789 Constitution was the second take at the operational details of the new federation.)

In sync with the themes of the holiday, I spoke this week with Texas Public Radio's hour-long interview program, "The Source" about how we should tell the story of America and my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. You can catch that interview with the San Antonio-based public radio network online here.

For a shorter take, I also spoke recently with WAMC / Northeast Public Radio's Joe Donoghue on "The Roundtable." I was happy to rejoin the network -- which serves eastern New York State (north of New Netherland) and the entire western third of New England -- which has had me on for American Nations and American Character as well.

This week I'll be coming to public radio listeners in southeastern Virginia, and central Tennessee.

Hope you enjoy.

Coronavirus in Maine at the onset of high tourist season

As the coronavirus spreads across the southern and western United States -- a topic I'll have more to say about tomorrow -- Mainers are simultaneously kicking off their summer tourist season, lifting Covid-19 restrictions, and hoping the state can keep the prevalence of the disease low, where it has been for much of the pandemic owing to low population density and an effective lockdown.

Two updates on how things are playing out here:

First, in today's Portland Press Herald: there's been a recent quadrupling in the pace of new non-resident cases here, though starting from a low level. With concerns about contact tracing of such individuals -- theoretically performed by public health departments in their native state or county -- one Maine community has created their own testing regimen for servers, cashiers, clerks and other front-line tourism workers.

Also in today's paper, your exclusive weekly update on covid hosptializations in the state, by hospital.  Good news: another fairly quiet week, though with upticks at some of the state's largest hospitals.

How Turner's Frontier Thesis led Americans astray

Frederick Jackson Turner of "Frontier Thesis" fame is one of the key subjects of Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, being the primary figure in creating the idea that American-ness was born on the expanding western frontier.

As I argued in this essay that appeared in Sunday's Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Turner's thesis was enormously influential, but entirely wrong. In fact, on digging further into the data, even Turner quickly realized this and pivoted to researching what he thought were the primary determinants of American political and sociological history: the difference between the competing "sections," or regional cultures. He spent the rest of his life trying to write a master work on this, a book that from his shorter form essays on the subject, could have resembled my American Nations in many ways.

Hope you enjoy the article. And if you want the full story, it's all in Union.

For a bit on another major figure in the book, Woodrow Wilson, see this in Talking Points Memo.

Woodrow Wilson was Even Worse Than You Think

Woodrow Wilson, one of the primary subjects of my new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, has just been shoved into the media spotlight after Princeton finally announced Saturday that it was striking his name from the school of public policy. The move -- which follows the trustee's refusal to do the same after protests against Wilson's true legacy four years ago - is leading other institutions and programs to reconsider their association with the former president.

And as well they should, as I argue in this essay posted yesterday afternoon over at Talking Points Memo. A taste:

"Son of the Confederacy’s leading cleric, apologist for the Klan, friend of the country’s most prominent racist demagogues, and architect and defender of an apartheid international racial order, the amazing thing is that Wilson’s name was ever associated with idealism or respectable statesmanship. In fact, delving deeply into his life to write “Union” — a book on the battle over whether the United States was to be defined by adherence to “natural rights” ideals contained in the Declaration of Independence, or to Anglo-Saxon bloodlines — I came away wondering how any institution would have wanted to be associated with his name at all, even in the 1920s or 1940s."

His role in the battle to shape the United States's identity is profoundly awful, and I hope those putting him on trial will add Union to the prosecutor's brief.

David Blight reviews UNION in the Washington Post

If I were to have created a wish list of eminent people who might be assigned to review my new book, David W. Blight, dean of Frederick Douglass biographers and historian of the implications of Reconstruction's collapse, would have been at the top. So I'm extremely excited that his review of Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood appears in today's print edition of the Washington Post. 

Blight, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography, Frederick Douglass, writes Union makes "visions of history into a kind of human drama... with a storyteller’s pace and vividness." In conclusion:

"The subtext for this book, like so much else these days, is Woodard’s fear that the 19th-century belief in an American ethno-state (meaning white) not only survived into our own time but is reascendant in Trumpism’s assault on “liberal civic nationalism.” As Woodard warns, only fools or the ignorant will think this battle will ever really end, even when President Trump and his own profane myth are banished."

Also, on Friday I joined Jefferson Public Radio, which serves the abortive State of Jefferson in southern Oregon and northern California, to talk about the book. That interview is here.

And finally, thanks again to Politics & Prose and NPR's Tom Gjelten for holding an excellent and enjoyable virtual book event this afternoon. That interview-and-audience questions session is now up via YouTube.

Talking with NPR's Tom Gjelten via Politics and Prose, June 28

COVID-19 has forced book tours have gone virtual, and my next stop for Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood is tomorrow, June 28, and it's a very cool one.

It's hosted by Washington, DC's famed bookstore, Politics & Prose, which uses an interview-and-audience-questions format via ZOOM. I'm delighted that Tom Gjelten -- of NPR fame, author of a great book on the effects of the 1965 immigration act, and fellow former Balkans-in-the-1990s correspondent -- is serving in the role of interviewer.

The event kicks off at 1pm. You can register for the Zoom-driven event here, and can also order books directly from the store's website. I'll be signing bookplates for them to add to those who want them.

Hope to see friends from DC and beyond there. [Update, 6/28/20: Thanks to Tom and P&P for a great event. The proceedings are now up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.]

For some early reviews of Union, check out this post (Library Journal, American Scholar) and this one (Kirkus, Booklist) and reviews in The Christian Science Monitor (which also named the book to their Top Ten Books for June list) and the Washington Post (by none other than David Blight, renowned scholar of Douglass and the rolling back of the civil rights gains of the Civil War.)

Christian Science Monitor on UNION

Thanks to the Christian Science Monitor, which this week first named Union to their list of the Top Ten June Books, and now has this excellent review from Steve Donoghue.

The review concludes with:

"Woodard describes facets of “an intellectual battle of the highest possible stakes” that raged over the rough century his book chronicles. 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."

Spot on.

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

My next virtual book event is June 28 with Politics and Prose (and NPR's Tom Gjelten interviewing me) from Washington. Details here. (I got to know Gjelten after reviewing his excellent book on the ramifications of the 1965 Immigration Act, A Nation of Nations, in the Washington Post.)