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Articles 1 - 30 of 46
Full-Text Articles in History
John Holmes And The Shifting Partisan Politics Of Slavery In Early Maine, Matthew Mason
John Holmes And The Shifting Partisan Politics Of Slavery In Early Maine, Matthew Mason
Maine History
The longevity and shifting partisan allegiances of the political career of John Holmes illuminate many of the issues animating Maine politics in the broad statehood era. None of these issues dogged Holmes or revealed the intersection of Maine and national politics better than that of slavery. His seemingly endless political flexibility makes Holmes an unusually good barometer of the mainstream position in Maine on slavery and related issues across this broad period. Matthew Mason is a professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of books including Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic(2006) and …
Two Narratives About A Nineteenth-Century African American Settlement In Rural Maine, Christopher Marshall
Two Narratives About A Nineteenth-Century African American Settlement In Rural Maine, Christopher Marshall
Maine History
African Americans lived in the central Maine townships of Troy and Burnham in the nineteenth century, and a region there is said to contain their abandoned settlement. This is a study of two local narratives about the settlement. Older residents maintain an oral tradition largely based on field evidence, while in-migrants tell a very different story linked to national meanings and events. Using oral histories, documentary research, and archaeological survey work, our research has uncovered much of the story of the African American presence in these towns. While bearers of each narrative tradition feel theirs is an accurate historical account …
With A Little Help From My Friends: Jewish Mutual Assistance In Nineteenth-Century Maine, David M. Freidenreich, Kristin Esdale
With A Little Help From My Friends: Jewish Mutual Assistance In Nineteenth-Century Maine, David M. Freidenreich, Kristin Esdale
Maine History
Jews in 19th-century Maine relied on familial, ethnic, and, to a lesser degree, institutional networks of mutual assistance to survive and thrive. These Jews, who commonly worked as merchants of clothing and other dry goods, counted on family members to get them through hard times and hired fellow Jews to peddle their wares in the countryside. Jewish peddlers and merchants regularly borrowed or loaned cash and goods on credit within a small, tightly knit community that extended across Maine and as far as Boston and New York. Commercial networks also reinforced familial ties as children and in-laws entered the family …
Photo Essay: State Of Mind: Becoming Maine, Maine Historical Society
Photo Essay: State Of Mind: Becoming Maine, Maine Historical Society
Maine History
The separation from Massachusetts in 1820 had different meanings and implications for residents grounded in geography, culture, race, and economic standing. Understanding that the history of how Maine became a state is rooted in the stories of people, State of Mind: Becoming Maine focuses on four distinct communities—Wabanaki, Acadien French, Black, and English-speaking people all who have deep ties to the land now known as Maine. While multitudes of distinct cultural communities have, and continue to call Maine home, the Wabanaki have cared for this land for millennia. The French, Black, and English-speaking people have resided here since the early …
Book Reviews, William David Berry, H. H. Price
Book Reviews, William David Berry, H. H. Price
Maine History
Reviews of the following books: Maine Labor in the Age of Decentralization and Global Markets 1955-2005 by Charles A. Scontras; Still Mill: Stories and Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine 1930-2014 edited by Patricia Smith Ranzoni.
“There Are Folks Comin’ After Us That Will Need Trees”: Progressive Era Conservation, The Woods Tradition, And Maine Writer Holman Francis Day, Dale E. Potts
Maine History
Throughout his novels, Maine author Holman Francis Day maintained the importance of both the conservation of timber and the cultural conservation of Maine’s rural communities. Day wrote his novels in a Progressive Era climate permeated by a wise-use ideology. The point for Day, however, was not whether resources should be used, but by whom; his approach emphasized Maine’s resources for Maine’s people and industry. As a writer of fiction, Day balanced the needs of the people of Maine with a concern for the natural resources that made the state unique. Dale Potts is an Assistant Professor of History at South …
At The “Busy Campus Crossroads”: The Last Fifty Years At Raymond H. Fogler Library, Desiree Butterfield-Nagy
At The “Busy Campus Crossroads”: The Last Fifty Years At Raymond H. Fogler Library, Desiree Butterfield-Nagy
Maine History
Keeping pace with an “overwhelming explosion of knowledge and information” has been a particular challenge for those at Raymond H. Fogler Library since the university celebrated its centennial in 1965. The technologies for the storage and delivery of information have seen unprecedented rates of innovation, acceptance, and obsolescence. Acquiring appropriate materials has necessitated a close look at changing needs of faculty, increasingly specialized programs, university budget freezes, shifting alignments with other libraries in the University of Maine System, and increasing costs of many subscription journals and databases. Even as electronic access has become prolific, libraries continue to be viewed as …
‘The Farmer’S Family Must Find Compensation In Something Less Tangible, Less Material’: Culture And Agriculture In Maine And New England, 1870-1905”, Cody P. Miller
Maine History
Following the Civil War, American agriculture changed dramatically, and New England was no exception. With new railroad systems, specialized crop markets, and chemical fertilizers, Maine and other New England farmers found themselves as part of an increasingly commercialized agricultural system. Farmers, urban pundits, and agricultural reformers all stressed the need to abandon small, mixed husbandry farming and instead they urged farmers to start treating agriculture like a business. In order to “progress,” one needed to increase acreage and adopt specialized cropping. While many farmers accepted this mantra, others resisted it and argued that there was a moral quality to agriculture …
Rosaries, Disease, And Storehouse Keys: Jesuit Conversion Efforts In Seventeenth-Century Acadia, Heather Sanford
Rosaries, Disease, And Storehouse Keys: Jesuit Conversion Efforts In Seventeenth-Century Acadia, Heather Sanford
Maine History
Throughout the seventeenth century, contests over medicinal orthodoxy between American Indians and Jesuit missionaries revealed the limits of compromise and communicated the values that determined the extent of their cooperation. When French Jesuits arrived in Acadia in 1611, they became witnesses to an epidemic that eventually eliminated an overwhelming majority of the Native population. Publicly proclaiming their desire to save souls, the priests converted disease into an evangelical tool. They began to use healing to persuade Wabanakis of the grace, power, and superiority of the Christian god. This article focuses on the convergence of spirituality and healing in Wabanaki and …
Making It In Maine: Stories Of Jewish Life In Small-Town America, David M. Freidenreich
Making It In Maine: Stories Of Jewish Life In Small-Town America, David M. Freidenreich
Maine History
A fundamental part of the experience of immigrants to the United States has been the tension between incorporating into a new country while maintaining one’s cultural roots. In this article, the author describes the experience of Jewish Americans in Maine, where climate, culture, and remoteness from larger Jewish populations contributed to a unique process of Americanization compared with Jewish populations in more urban areas of the country. After successfully “making it” over the course of two centuries, Jewish Mainers face a new set of challenges and opportunities. The author is the director of the Jewish studies program at Colby College …
Making It Work Before The Movement: African-American Community And Resistance In 1940s And 1950s Portland, Maine, Justus Hillebrand
Making It Work Before The Movement: African-American Community And Resistance In 1940s And 1950s Portland, Maine, Justus Hillebrand
Maine History
African Americans in Portland, Maine, in the 1940s and 1950s made up less than 0.5% of the population. As a consequence, discourse on race was more subtle than it was in other parts of the country. The Portland black community, as in other small northern New England cities, lacked the numbers for broad public or political action. Instead, African Americans developed individual and informal strategies of resistance aimed at broadening opportunities in education, employment, and housing. African Americans “made it work” by congregating in their own church, persevering in their own educational goals, operating their own businesses, and owning their …
Elijah Lovejoy’S Oration On The Fiftieth Anniversary Of American Independence: An Essay Discovered, William G. Chrystal
Elijah Lovejoy’S Oration On The Fiftieth Anniversary Of American Independence: An Essay Discovered, William G. Chrystal
Maine History
On July 4, 1826, the American republic celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with great fanfare. In this research note, the author provides a transcript of an oration delivered in China, Maine on that day. The speaker was local schoolmaster Elijah P. Lovejoy, better known for his tragic death eleven years later. By then an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Illinois, Lovejoy was killed in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob. Lovejoy’s 1826 oration, then, serves as both a compelling look at the celebration of America’s Jubilee in rural Maine and an early example of the ideological convictions which led Lovejoy to abolitionism. …
“What The Women Of Maine Have Done”: Women’S Wartime Work And Postwar Activism, 1860-1875, Lisa Marie Rude
“What The Women Of Maine Have Done”: Women’S Wartime Work And Postwar Activism, 1860-1875, Lisa Marie Rude
Maine History
Maine women had been active in reform movements during the antebellum era. They joined mother’s associations, temperance groups, abolitionist societies, and woman suffrage organizations. Although the Civil War did not create activists, it did strengthen them, while opening the door for other women to become activists. The war provided an unprecedented opportunity for the women of Maine to be actors in the public sphere. Postwar women’s movements in Maine were therefore fueled by their agency on the home front during the war. The author is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maine, working under the supervision of Dr. …
A Man Of Many: Mainer Frank Lowell And White-Native Marriages In Territorial Alaska, Sandy Brue
A Man Of Many: Mainer Frank Lowell And White-Native Marriages In Territorial Alaska, Sandy Brue
Maine History
Born into a well-known and influential New England family, Frank Lowell left his home in Maine and moved to Alaska soon after the territory was purchased by the United States in 1867. His upbringing in a shipbuilding and seafaring family from Maine prepared Frank well for his new life. His life in sparsely-settled Alaska was quite different, though, from his old life in coastal Maine. During his more than fifty years in Alaska, Frank married three Native women and fathered fifteen children. There were practical reasons for Frank to form such unions, but it also demonstrates that racial boundaries were …
Glimpses Into The Life Of A Maine Reformer: Elizabeth Upham Yates, Missionary And Woman Suffragist, Shannon M. Risk
Glimpses Into The Life Of A Maine Reformer: Elizabeth Upham Yates, Missionary And Woman Suffragist, Shannon M. Risk
Maine History
Raised in a religious family in Bristol, Elizabeth Upham Yates spent much of her adult life as a reformer. While in her twenties, Yates spent six years in China serving as a Methodist missionary trying to spread the gospel and Western culture. Upon returning to the United States she became involved in two domestic reform movements, temperance and women’s suffrage. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement from the 1890s until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and ran for lieutenant governor of Rhode Island in the election of 1920. Yates was never a nationally renowned figure …
The Bodwell Granite Company Store And The Community Of Vinalhaven, Maine, 1859-1919, Cynthia Burns Martin
The Bodwell Granite Company Store And The Community Of Vinalhaven, Maine, 1859-1919, Cynthia Burns Martin
Maine History
From the late 1850s to the late 1910s, Bodwelll Granite Company on Vinalhaven Island operated a Company Store from which employees could purchase a wide variety of consumer goods. In the early decades of its existence, the Company Store was generally popular with the company’s employees and the island community. Because of certain competitive advantages, and because the company was guaranteed a profit through federal contracts, the company store often had lower prices than its competitors. But by the late nineteenth century, the store’s prices were often higher than its competitors and the store became part of the growing rift …
The Maine Indian Land Claim Settlement: A Personal Recollection, John M.R. Paterson
The Maine Indian Land Claim Settlement: A Personal Recollection, John M.R. Paterson
Maine History
From 1971 to 1980, the state of Maine grappled with one of the greatest legal challenges ever before it. That challenge had its origin in a suit brought by the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes against the U.S. Department of the Interior seeking the seemingly simple declaration that the department owed a fiduciary duty to the tribes based on a federal law adopted in 1790. That suit was eventually to lead to a suit by the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Maine, and potentially 350,000 residents in the eastern two-thirds of the state, seeking return of land taken …
“Mr.Editor, Have We Digressed?” Newspaper Editor John Neal And The Woman Suffrage Debate, Shannon M. Risk
“Mr.Editor, Have We Digressed?” Newspaper Editor John Neal And The Woman Suffrage Debate, Shannon M. Risk
Maine History
In May and June of 1870, Portland newspaper editor and reformer John Neal sparked a debate over women’s suffrage that elicited strong views on women’s place in society. Neal posted a call in the Daily Eastern Argus to like-minded women and men to meet to discuss how to bring about the women’s vote. His post led to a debate in Portland’s newspapers about the idea of women’s suffrage. Several respondents expressed outrage at women’s participation in politics, fearing it would lead to society’s downfall. Although the debate died down in June, Neal’s efforts gave renewed energy to Maine suffragists. The …
Model Cities, Housing, And Renewal Policy In Portland, Maine: 1965-1974, John F. Bauman
Model Cities, Housing, And Renewal Policy In Portland, Maine: 1965-1974, John F. Bauman
Maine History
Shepherded through Congress by Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, the 1967 Model (or Demonstration) Cities Program was originally intended for the nation’s large, ghetto-ridden metropolises where it would target a host of social and economic programs including housing. Thanks to Senator Muskie, both Portland and Lewiston benefited. Before the Nixon Administration scuttled the program in 1973, Portland had created a host of innovative housing, social welfare, law enforcement, and educational programs, shifting the city’s urban renewal program away from its strict emphasis on brick-and-mortar planning. Portland was unique in making Model Cities a part of its downtown renewal. Energizing the city’s …
“Taking Up The Slack”: Penobscot Bay Women And The Netting Industry, Nancy Payne Alexander
“Taking Up The Slack”: Penobscot Bay Women And The Netting Industry, Nancy Payne Alexander
Maine History
Between 1860 and 1900 the economy of Penobscot Bay communities changed dramatically, from the steady growth and prosperity of their natural resource-based economy to the decline in population and a painful transition to manufacturing and service industries. Both men and women had enjoyed independence in their labor in the old economy. The new cash economy made it necessary for them to seek out new ways of supporting their families, with home manufacture, or putting out work, one way of earning an income. They remained independent from an employer’s direct supervision and earned cash payment, a change from the face-to-face economy …
The Hillbillies Of Maine: Rural Communities, Radio, And Country Music Performers, Erica Risberg
The Hillbillies Of Maine: Rural Communities, Radio, And Country Music Performers, Erica Risberg
Maine History
During the first third of the twentieth century, the United Sates underwent profound social, technological, and economic changes that fundamentally altered rural society. This shift created a divide between rural and urban dwellers, and by the 1930s, country people were developing their own cultural expressions, often reflecting the unique folkways of various regions — the South, Appalachia, the Ozark Plateau, the rural West. One such manifestation of country culture was old-time, or country-western music — also known as hillbilly music. At the time, radio broadcasting was at an experimental stage in reaching an American audience. Station WBLZ in Bangor covered …
Hanging Ebenezer Ball, William L. Welch
Hanging Ebenezer Ball, William L. Welch
Maine History
Ebenezer Ball of Robbinston was the first man hanged for murder in Eastern Maine. A native of Massachusetts proper, he had drifted “downeast,” and become part of a lawless culture endemic to Maine’s borderlands in the early nineteenth century. Suspected of counterfeiting and confronted by authority ,he retreated to the woods, and a lawman died at his hands. Although he might have fled, he stayed, and was tried, convicted, and executed for murder in 1811. Ball’s case is seminal, since it gives us insight into the workings of the criminal justice system in Maine in the years prior to statehood. …
Saving Schoodic: A Story Of Development, Lost Settlement, And Preservation, Alan K. Workman
Saving Schoodic: A Story Of Development, Lost Settlement, And Preservation, Alan K. Workman
Maine History
Remote, isolated, and nearly barren Schoodic Point, now the easternmost part of Acadia National Park, was long bypassed by early explorers and settlers. It might have seemed destined to remain deserted, a candidate for coastal parkland preservation in the twentieth century. But like such distant outposts as Vinalhaven, Swan’s, and Ironbound islands, Schoodic in the nineteenth century was overtaken by extensive land development, logging, and settlement by fishermen farmers. Eventually its proximity to Bar Harbor made it a target for vacation resort cottages. Yet Schoodic’s peninsular ecology and elements of its social circumstances helped it escape such development in favor …
An Enduring Technology: The Horse Logging Tradition In Maine, James E. Passanisi
An Enduring Technology: The Horse Logging Tradition In Maine, James E. Passanisi
Maine History
No abstract provided.
Comments On The Ship’S Log Kept By Captain Ephraim Jones Of A Voyage From Falmouth To Bermuda And The Turks Islands,1765, Charles P.M. Outwin
Comments On The Ship’S Log Kept By Captain Ephraim Jones Of A Voyage From Falmouth To Bermuda And The Turks Islands,1765, Charles P.M. Outwin
Maine History
Willis Collection, volume K, rear, Maine Historical Society Collections
Reconstructing Wabanaki History, The Editors
Reconstructing Wabanaki History, The Editors
Maine History
Beyond the period of European contact and the colonial wars, the Wabanaki are poorly represented in the annals of Maine history. In the past twenty-four years, only twelve articles on Wabanaki topics have crossed the editor’s desk — about one every two years. In this environment of scarcity, it is our pleasure to present our current issue.
Buckfield: A Geographical History Of Rural Development In Nineteenth-Century Oxford County, Nancy Hatch
Buckfield: A Geographical History Of Rural Development In Nineteenth-Century Oxford County, Nancy Hatch
Maine History
In this article author Nancy Hatch presents a geographical and historical account of the town of Buckfield, Oxford County; Maine, that elaborates a model of center-village development constructed by Joseph Wood in his The New England Village, and a model of connected farm buildings, as constructed by Thomas Hubka in his Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn. Hatch uses these models to explain how Buckfield responded to the growth of inter-regional agricultural markets in the mid-nineteenth century and to new architectural styles that appeared on the national scene in these decades. Ms. Hatch was a student at …
Settling Oxford County: Maine’S Revolutionary War Bounty Myth, Jean F. Hankins
Settling Oxford County: Maine’S Revolutionary War Bounty Myth, Jean F. Hankins
Maine History
It is a common assumption that many New England frontier towns were founded by veterans of the Revolutionary War who had been given land for their service to the country. Author Jean Hankins's careful research in deeds, records, and legislative acts shows that this was not the case in representative Oxford County towns. Although there were a variety of bounties given for land in these towns, few had anything to do with the Revolutionary War. The Revolutionary War bounty myth persists, the author specidates, because it is an appealing way to begin the history of these towns, and because, since …
“A Jornal Of A Fue Days At York”: The Great Awakening On The Northern New England Frontier, Douglas L. Winiarski
“A Jornal Of A Fue Days At York”: The Great Awakening On The Northern New England Frontier, Douglas L. Winiarski
Maine History
During the early 1740s, New England communities along the northern frontier witnessed a series of religious revivals that were part of a transatlantic movement known as the Great Awakening. Promoted by touring evangelists such as George Whitefield and lesser known local clergyman, the revivals dominated the daily activities of ordinary men and women. Published here for the first time, “A Jornal of afue Days at York, 1741,” presents a vivid portrayal of the local dynamics of the Awakening in Maine and New Hampshire. The author of the “Jornal,” an anonymous Boston merchant, chronicled nightly prayer meetings, conversations with pious local …
Jim Vickery’S Cherished Images Of Maine: A Photographic Essay, William H. Bunting
Jim Vickery’S Cherished Images Of Maine: A Photographic Essay, William H. Bunting
Maine History
No abstract provided.