Lilacs, Cellar Holes, and the Courthouse: A Historian’s Reflections on Re-Creating Mount Desert Islanders

In this article Kimberly Sebold outlines the process by which historians reconstruct the lives of ordinary rural people—in this case, fishermen, carpenters, farmers, and farm-wives living on Mount Desert Island. Using a combination of archival research, archaeology, landscape interpretation, and common sense, Sebold and her colleagues paint a surprisingly detailed picture of these seemingly obscure individuals and the community in which they lived and experienced the joys and hardships of nineteenth-century Maine life. Dr. Sebold received her Ph.D. from the University of Maine in 1998. She is currently an Assistant professor of History at the University of Maine at Presque Isle

“Amid the Great Sea Meadows”: Re-Constructing the Salt-Marsh Landscape through Art and Literature

Salt marshes played an important role in northern New England agricultural from the colonial period to the twentieth century. While some coastal residents depended upon the natural grasses or salt hay to provide them with additional winter fodder, others transformed wetland into farmland through reclamation. The activities of salt marsh farmers created a whole new landscape which, ironically; late nineteenth-century artists and writers portrayed as the last vestiges of a “natural” landscape along the northern New England coast. Their paintings, photographs, poetry and stories established the salt marshes as an important part of coastal New England identity and aided the development of an idealistic world called “Olde New England.” Kimberly R. Sebold, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Maine in 1998

Book Reviews

Reviews of the following books: Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century by Joseph A. Conforti; Katahdin: Wigwam\u27s Tales of the Abnaki Tribe by Molly Spotted Elk. Edited by Pauleena M. MacDougall; Passing for White: Race, Religion and the Healy Family, 1820-1920 by James M. O\u27Toole; Russian Voices on the Kennebec: The Story of Maine\u27s Unlikely Colony by Robert S. Jaster

Book Reviews

Reviews of the following books: The Same Great Struggle: The History of the Vickery Family of Unity, Maine, 1634-1997 by Andrea Constantine Hawkes; Canning Gold: Northern New England\u27s Sweet Corn Industry: A Historical Geography by Paul B. Frederic; Antiqueman\u27s Diary: The Memoir of Fred Bishop Tuck edited by Dean A. Fales, Jr

Book Reviews

Reviews of the following books: Little Pine to King Spruce: A Franco-American Childhood by Fran Pelletier; This Splendid Game: Maine Campaigns and Elections, 1940-2002 by Christian P. Potholm; Giving Voters a Voice: The Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in America by Steven L. Piott; The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine\u27s Wildlands by Neil Rold

Book Reviews

Reviews of the following books: Mourning on the Pejepscot by Teresa M. Flanagan; Coastal Maine: A Maritime History by Roger Duncan; The Libby Family in America, 1882-1982 edited by Wilma Libby Rodgers and David Jotham Trafton; Politics of Conscience: A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith by Margaret Ward Wallace; Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work by Paula Blanchar

Book Reviews

Reviews of the following books: The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791-1991 by Louis Leonard Tucker; Interpreting Early American History Essays by Jack P. Greene; Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris by Bunny McBride; The Artist\u27s Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast by John Wilmerding; Politics of Conscience: A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith by Patricia Ward Wallace; Maine, A Peopled Landscape: Salt Documentary Photography, 1978 to 1995 edited by Hugh French, with essays by C. Stewart Doty, James C. Curtis and R. Todd Hoffman; Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 by Martha Free.man; Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work by Paula Blanchar

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival