Virtual Author Talk with Colin Woodard
September 7, 2020
7:00 p.m.
In author Colin Woodard’s book “American Nations,” Woodard contended that we have never been one America, but a collection of rival regional cultures. In his newest book Union, he asks the next question: when and how did we come to convince ourselves that we were "one nation" with a shared past, purpose, and future? This program is co-sponsored by Acadia Senior College, Jesup Memorial Library, and the League of Women Voters of Maine Downeast.
In Union, Woodard explores how the idea of a unified country has ignored the basic facts of our history, and examines how the myth of our national unity was created and fought over by key players – George Bancroft, William Gilmore Simms, Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Jackson Turner – and how it continues to affect us today.
On one side of the fight was a small group of individuals who promoted a history of the United States that attempted to transcend and erase the fundamental differences and profound tensions between the nation’s regional cultures. But this history was immediately contested by another set of intellectuals who claimed that if we are a nation at all, it is an ethno-state belonging to the allegedly superior Anglo-Saxon race. This concept eventually morphed into white supremacy and ethno-nationalism, and is therefore startlingly relevant to today’s political discussions.
Woodard is a New York Times bestselling writer, historian and journalist who has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and six continents. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and The San Francisco Chronicle, he is now a reporter at the Portland Press Herald, where he received a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and Politico. He is the author of “American Nations,” “American Character,” “The Lobster Coast,” “The Republic of Pirates” and “Ocean's End.”
Virtual Zoom presentation
Click to register for this talk – you will receive an email with the link to join the presentation.
Books will be on sale for this virtual event from co-sponsor Sherman’s Books. Attendees can purchase the book through shermans.com, or by calling 207-288-3161, as well as at any Sherman's locations.