“Hard Work to Make Ends Meet”: Voices of Maine’s Working-Class Women in the Late Nineteenth Century

In 1887 the Maine legislature responded to pressures from the Knights of Labor and an increasingly agitated industrial labor force by instituting the Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics. The bureau’s job was to examine the state\u27s workplaces and provide information to guide the legislature in making labor law. Reflecting the ideals of the popular Knights of Labor, the bureau initially focused its investigations on female as well as male workers. When the bureau requested that workers fill out questionnaires about their work, hundreds of women responded, leaving a rare first-hand account of women’s attitudes toward their working and living conditions. With the decline of the Knights between 1888 and 1895, working women’s voices disappear from the records. Although the bureau’s effort did little to ameliorate hard work and low wages, the information they collected provides valuable clues to understanding the women who worked in Maine\u27s late nineteenth-century shops and factories. Carol Toner is Coordinator for the Certificate in Maine Studies Program and Research Associate in History at the University of Maine. She is the author of Persisting Traditions: Artisan Work and Culture in Bangor, Maine, 1820-1860 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995) and several articles on Maine labor history

Franklin Muzzy: Artisan Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century Bangor

This article provides an overview of the life of an artisan and business man during the 19th century in Maine

What Kind of Place Do We Want to Live In? Place, the Humanities, and Public Policy in Maine

Carol Toner explores the intersection of the humanities, public policy making, and quality of place. In 2014, a local protest against the site of a potential new landfill in rural Maine demonstrates how citizens can draw from their history and culture when considering public policy and quality of place. In this case, the humanities informed the making of public policy to benefit the greater good. Maine enjoys a participatory public policy process that depends on informed public input. The humanities, especially history, literature, and philosophy, help prepare citizens for this important role by teaching critical thinking, imagination, and compassion. Maine Studies students, through interdisciplinary and community-engaged research methods, draw from the humanities to examine public policy and to consider what is best for Maine people and their place

Book Reviews

Reviews of the following books: An Upriver Passamaquoddy by Allen J. Sockabasin; The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories by Elizabeth A. DeWolfe; American Silk, 1830-1930: Entrepremeurs and Artifacts by Jackqueline Field, Marjorie Senechal and Madelyn Shaw

Book Reviews

Reviews of the following books: A Brides Passage: Susan Hathorns Year Under Sail edited by Catherine Petroski; Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert by Pamela J. Belanger; Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World by Alison Games; Johnson\u27s Kingdom: The Story of a Nineteenth Century Industrial Kingdom in the Town of Wayne, Maine by Edward Kallop; Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Food, at Sea and Ashore in the Nineteenth Century By Sandra L. Olive

Persisting Traditions: Artisan Work and Culture in Bangor, Maine, 1820-1860

This book is about the work and culture of artisans in Bangor, Maine, during the decades of early industrialization. The central question posed here is how did these artisans, these highly skilled housewrights and shipwrights, tinsmiths and blacksmiths, carriage makers and cabinet makers, coopers and cordwainers, iron founders and other skilled workers, respond to the emerging industrial system?https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/fac_monographs/1275/thumbnail.jp

Somalis in Maine: Crossing Cultural Currents

Lewiston, a mill town of about thirty-six thousand people, is the second-largest city in Maine. It is also home to some three thousand Somali refugees. After initially being resettled in larger cities elsewhere, Somalis began to arrive in Lewiston by the dozens, then the hundreds, after hearing stories of Maine’s attractions through family networks. Today, cross-cultural interactions are reshaping the identities of Somalis—and adding new chapters to the immigrant history of Maine. Somalis in Maine offers a kaleidoscope of voices that situate the story of Somalis’ migration to Lewiston within a larger cultural narrative. Combining academic analysis with refugees’ personal stories, this anthology includes reflections on leaving Somalia, the experiences of Somali youth in U.S. schools, the reasons for Somali secondary migration to Lewiston, the employment of many Lewiston Somalis at Maine icon L. L. Bean, and community dialogues with white Mainers. Somalis in Maine seeks to counter stereotypes of refugees as being socially dependent and unable to assimilate, to convey the richness and diversity of Somali culture, and to contribute to a greater understanding of the intertwined futures of Somalis and Americans.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/fac_monographs/1050/thumbnail.jp