On September 28 at 6:30pm, I’ll be in South Portland talking about the backstory of Maine on the occasion of its Bicentennial: a harrowing and little understood saga of war and betrayal, of clashing empires and ethnic cleansing, of civil war and colonial occupation by Massachusetts of what had been a separate province. These events shaped Mainers as a people and explain some of the culture’s most impressive virtues and most frustrating faults, as well as the still fraught relationship between this land’s real natives and the rest of us whose families came “from away” at some point in the past four hundred years.
These are issues discussed in my history of coastal Maine, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier, as well as my Maine Sunday Telegram series published just as the pandemic began, “Colony.”
This talk at the South Portland Public Library is free and open to the public. It’s a twice-rescheduled event co-sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council that was originally intended to have been delivered during Maine’s Bicentennial summer of 2020 which, of course, became instead Maine’s pandemic summer of 2020, and again postponed this spring because of a Covid resurgence. But third time is a charm!
Nonesuch Books will be on hand to sell books, which I’m happy to sign. Hope to see you there.
My next public talk is in Freeport, Maine, where I’ll be talking about saving our democracy.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.