Cultural History Commons^™

Wabanaki Experiences And Perspectives On “Our Shared Ocean”: Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission Special Report Sea Run, Anthony W. Sutton, Judson Esty-Kendall, Paul Thibeault

Maine Policy Review

The Maine Indian State Tribal Commission (MITSC) recently published a special report titled, Sea Run, documenting the impact of Colonial and Maine policies and activities on the quality and quantity of tribal fisheries spanning the time from first contact between Europeans and the Wabanaki Nations to today.

"A Nice, Beautiful, Active, & Faithful Friend": Horses & Emotion In The Civil War Letters Of Two Union Officers, Allen F. Horn Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Horses are the unsung heroes of the American Civil War. Both armies relied heavily on equines for a variety of tasks. They carried cavalry soldiers on the battlefield and pulled wagons for artillery and military supply chains. Horses could also serve as companion animals. Soldiers formed friendships with their horses as a way to heal from the trauma of combat and stave off the monotony of camp life. Writing about animals in letters to their families enabled soldiers to explain their experiences in more palatable terms to their families. As over 1.2 million horses and mules died in the conflict, …

Bound By Print: The Baptist Borderlands Of Maine And The Canadian Maritimes, 1770-1840, Brittany P. Goetting

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Asynchronous communication was essential for the development of the cross-border and global identities of Baptists in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes between 1770 and 1840. Religious print, especially published association meeting notes and periodicals, extended the reach of itinerant preaching and molded a cross-border community in the Northeast Borderlands between 1790 and 1810. It allowed Baptists to discuss theology, share news about local churches, and expand their community. American Baptists formed international institutions focused on the spread of Protestantism after the War of 1812, and Maine Baptists actively engaged this more global community through financial donations to the new institutions …

Where Do I Belong In The United States Public School System?, Christiana R. Becker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I seek to inquire about the world as it relates to my identity as a first generation descent of the Penobscot tribe living in the United States by utilizing four methodologies in my research: life histories/autobiographies, narrative inquiry, a/r/tography and practice-based and practice-led. Through coupling my artistic practice with those four methodologies I am able to creatively show the information I have unearthed in hopes that others will benefit from a fresh and augmented understanding of what it historically and culturally means to be a part of a community that makes up a very small percentage of the United States …

A Concealment Shoe As Ritualistic Grieving Gesture: A Case Study In An Early 20th Century Maine Finnish Immigrant Community, Anne Bardaglio

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The widespread practice of ritually concealing shoes as apotropaic devices to protect liminal spaces such as walls, thresholds, windows, and chimneys, most often in private homes, dates to the 14th century. The practice also has roots in pre-Christian, pan-European traditions of domestic spirits and can sometimes function as a commemorative gesture to memorialize deceased loved ones. This study analyzes an early 20th-century concealed shoe deposit discovered in Long Cove, Maine and locating it within the cultural context of Long Cove’s history as a Finnish immigrant community within an approximately twenty-year period (c. 1890-1910). The study explores ways in which the …

"Black Studies In 21st Century Higher Education" Webinar Video, University Of Maine Black Student Union, University Of Maine Alumni Association, John H. Bracey Jr., Ph.D., Sonia Sanchez Ph.D.

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Video, transcript, and promotional materials for a web-based seminar featuring Dr. Sonia Sanchez and Dr. John Bracey discussing Black Studies in 21st century higher education. The Black History Month program was hosted by the University of Maine Black Student Union, co-hosted by the UMaine Alumni Association.

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

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

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

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

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

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 …

Department Of History Symposium Series, Featuring Dr. Edward Baptist, University Of Maine Department Of History

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

As the only Ph.D.-granting department int he Humanities in the entire state, the History Department at the University of Maine plays a crucial role training humanists who staff cultural organizations throughout the state, including all other UMS campuses, and many faculty and staff positions at UMaine. The October 16 Lecture will bring an expert to campus to speak about the Morrill Land Grant act and how it transformed US values for the modern era.This lecture is a keystone in CLAS and UMHC programming for the Homecoming Weekend, and it will be followed by a CLAS alumni and friends reception at …

Reverend Jonathan Fisher: One Thread In The Web Of Early American Education, 1780-1830, Brittany P. Cathey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jonathan Fisher was a remarkably gifted man with a passionate interest in the education of the future generations of Maine citizens. No historian, however, has yet to examine Jonathan Fisher’s connection to American educational trends. Primary and secondary schools had existed in colonial America since the 1630s. Fisher witnessed and participated in the transformation of American schooling through his involvement in the local schools, libraries and education within his home, his establishment and maintenance of the Blue Hill Academy and the Bangor Theological Seminary and the publication of his juvenile works The Youth’s Primer and Scripture Animals.

The first …

‘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

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 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

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

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. …

Passamaquoddy People / Les Passamaquoddys / Peskotomuhkatiyik, Downeast Fisheries Trail, Roosevelt-Campobello International Park

Maine Sea Grant Publications

Passamaquoddy people trace their ancestry to time immemorial. The oldest archaeological site dates back to more than 13,000 years ago, when people moved into the region as the glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. …