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Articles 1 - 19 of 19
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 …
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, Sean Cox, Eileen Hagerman, George Kotlik, Thomas Peace, Hannah Schmidt, Eric Toups
Book Reviews, Sean Cox, Eileen Hagerman, George Kotlik, Thomas Peace, Hannah Schmidt, Eric Toups
Maine History
Reviews of the following books: Historic Acadia National Park, The Stories Behind One of America's Great Treasures by Catherine Schmitt; Without Benefit of Insects: The Story of Edith M. Patch of the University of Maine by Elizabeth Gibbs; French and Indian Wars in Maine by Michael Dekker; Wabanaki Homeland and the New State of Maine: The 1820 Journal and Plans of Survey of Joseph Treat edited by Micah Pawling; The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright by Ann M. Little; Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War by Lisa Books
Photo Essay: Holding Up The Sky: Wabanaki People, Culture, History & Art, Tilly Laskey
Photo Essay: Holding Up The Sky: Wabanaki People, Culture, History & Art, Tilly Laskey
Maine History
Holding up the Sky is on view at Maine Historical Society through February 1, 2019. The exhibition gallery is located at 489 Congress St. in Portland. Please visit MaineHistory.org for hours and ticket information.
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 …
A Child Of The Atlantic: The Maine Years Of John Brown Russwurm, Carl Patrick Burrowes
A Child Of The Atlantic: The Maine Years Of John Brown Russwurm, Carl Patrick Burrowes
Maine History
Celebrated in life as co-founder of America’s first black newspaper, John Brown Russwurm was the embodiment of an Atlantic Creole. Born in Jamaica to a white American father and a black Jamaican mother, as a young man Russwurm moved to North America. Throughout his teens and twenties, his “home” was southern Maine, and he was given a good secondary education there. After finishing school, Russwurm taught in several black schools in Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. It was in these cities that he came into contact with America’s free black leaders, some of whom supported the movement to colonize …
Creating An Indian Enemy In The Borderlands: King Philip’S War In Maine, 1675-1678, Christopher J. Bilodeau
Creating An Indian Enemy In The Borderlands: King Philip’S War In Maine, 1675-1678, Christopher J. Bilodeau
Maine History
In the borderlands space between New England and Québec, the Wabanaki Indians had their own reasons for getting embroiled in a conflict that started in southern New England, King Philip’s War (1675-1678). This essay argues that, ironically, the English vision of a monolithic Indian enemy was the key to Wabanaki success in this war. The Wabanakis were a heterogeneous group when it came to the issue of fighting the English, with many eager to join the fight, others ambivalent, and still others against. The English of Massachusetts Bay and Maine, however, treated the entire Wabanaki population as united under a …
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 …
A Company Of Shadows: Slaves And Poor Free Menial Laborers In Cumberland County, Maine, 1760 – 1775, Charles P.M. Outwin
A Company Of Shadows: Slaves And Poor Free Menial Laborers In Cumberland County, Maine, 1760 – 1775, Charles P.M. Outwin
Maine History
Although slaves and poor, free menial laborers were by no means a majority of the population in late colonial-era Maine, they represented a culturally and socioeconomically significant part of commercial society there, especially at Falmouth in Casco Bay (now Portland) and in coastal Cumberland County. This essay uncovers the lives of the Falmouth’s small slave population and its larger poor menial laborer population from 1760 up to the port city’s destruction by the British in 1775. The author was granted a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maine in 2009. He is a member of the Maine Historical Society, …
The Library Of Professor Meserve, Daniel Rosenberg
The Library Of Professor Meserve, Daniel Rosenberg
Maine History
Charles Francis Meserve was an early summer resident of Squirrel Island and an important educational reformer around the turn of the twentieth century. Charles married Fannie Philbrick, whose father, John W. Philbrick, built a house on Squirrel Island. Eventually, the Philbrick cottage passed to the Meserves and become home to their books.
The Governor’S Gallows: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain And The Clifton Harris Case, Jason Finkelstein
The Governor’S Gallows: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain And The Clifton Harris Case, Jason Finkelstein
Maine History
In 1867, Auburn was home to one of the most vicious murders committed in the state’s history. Clifton Harris, a southern black teenager, was corralled for questioning and within hours confessed to the crime. He was tried and convicted solely upon his own confession, without any evidence against him. Harris became only the second prisoner ever to be executed in Thomaston State Prison. Indeed, the de facto abolition of the death penalty had taken place nearly three decades earlier, but Governor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain steadfastly proclaimed that he would carry out Harris’s death sentence in the face of political opposition. …
A Letter From Joshua Cushman, Matthew Mason
Burnt Harvest: Penobscot People And Fire, James Eric Francis Sr.
Burnt Harvest: Penobscot People And Fire, James Eric Francis Sr.
Maine History
The scientific and ethnographic record confirms the fact that in southern New England, Indians used fire as a forest management tool, to facilitate travel and hunting, encourage useful grasses and berries, and to clear land for agriculture. Scholars have long suggested that agricultural practices, and hence these uses of fire, ended at the Saco or Kennebec, with Native people east of this divide less likely to systematically burn their forests. This article argues that Native people on the Penobscot River used fire, albeit in more limited ways, to transform the forest and create a natural environment more conducive to their …
Book Reviews, Polly Welts Kaufman, Christian P. Potholm, Jean F. Hankins
Book Reviews, Polly Welts Kaufman, Christian P. Potholm, Jean F. Hankins
Maine History
Reviews of the following books: The Penobscot Dance of Resistence: Tradition in the History of a People by Pauleena MacDougall; Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of its People by H. H. Price and Gerald E.Talbot; Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 by Joshua M. Smith.
Thomas Brackett Reed, Civil Rights, And The Fight For Fair Elections, Wendy Hazard
Thomas Brackett Reed, Civil Rights, And The Fight For Fair Elections, Wendy Hazard
Maine History
Few causes in American history have proved more enduring than the effort to ensure all citizens the right to vote. From the enfranchising of African-Americans after the Civil War to the granting of women’s suffrage and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the country has struggled to live up to its image as the guardian of the ideal that every citizen has a guaranteed right to vote. The prolonged presidential election of 2000 and the vote-counting debacle in Florida once again focused national attention on the issue of enfranchisement. Democrats argued that the Florida election, whether by …
The Wabanaki Confederacy, Willard Walker
The Wabanaki Confederacy, Willard Walker
Maine History
Willard Walker is a Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University who lives in Canaan, Maine. He did field work with the Great Whale River Crees in the 1950s and the Passamaquoddies in the 1960s. He wrote “The Proto-Algonquians ” in Linguistics And Anthropology: In Honor Of C. F. Voegelin; “A Chronological Account of the Wabanaki Confederacy, with R .Conkling and G. Buesing in Political Organization Of Native North Americans; “Gabriel Tomah’s Journal,” Man In The Northeast (1981); “Literacy, Wampums, the Gudebuk, and How Indians in the Far Northeast Read, ” Anthropological Linguistics (1984); and …
Eastern Abenaki Autonomy And French Frustrations, 1745-1760, David L. Ghere
Eastern Abenaki Autonomy And French Frustrations, 1745-1760, David L. Ghere
Maine History
Most Abenaki Indians became French allies between 1745 and 1760, but in effect it was English policy that ultimately drove them into this alliance. While the Western Abenakis were generally reliable allies, French officials were repeatedly frustrated by their limited influence over the Eastern Abenakis and by the restrained reaction of these Indians to English provocations. Eastern Abenakis became reluctant French allies.
Grandmother, Daughter, Princess, Squaw: Native American Female Stereotypes In Historical Perspective, Pauleena M. Macdougall
Grandmother, Daughter, Princess, Squaw: Native American Female Stereotypes In Historical Perspective, Pauleena M. Macdougall
Maine History
One consequence of the English-Algonquin interaction was the development of certain female stereotypes. The Algonquin language term for female evolved into the English word “squaw” and assumed new meaning as it was applied to all Native American women. Similarly, the daughter of a tribal leader; married to a British man, acquired the attributes of European royalty, becoming a “princess. ”
Evidence Of Jessakkidds At Machiasport, Roger B. Ray
Evidence Of Jessakkidds At Machiasport, Roger B. Ray
Maine History
Jessakkidds are powerful and prestigious members of an Ojibiua religious society. Evidence of their appearance in eastern Maine - signaling anxiety among the Native peoples of the area - can be found in petroglyphs, etched in rock on the shores of Holmes Bay. In this article Roger B. Ray con nects the symbols in the Sprague-site petro glyphs with the turmoil at the end of the Laurentian Tradition way of life.