Thanks to the Animals

When the Born to Read program selected books for its anti-bias initiative, Many Eyes, Many Voices, there was a distressing gap in the field of contenders: a suitable children’s book about Maine Native Americans. The few titles available were either too stereotypical or too distant—tales populated by warriors with headresses, or set amidst Plains buffalo or Southwest deserts. That changed in 2005, when Tilbury House publishers in Gardiner, Maine, published Thanks to the Animals by Passamaquoddy storyteller Allen Sockabasin. Born to Read Program Officer Brita Zitin sat down with Sockabasin and his editor, Audrey Maynard, to talk about the story behind this important book.

To learn more about Sockabasin, see this newsletter article. To leave your feedback on this podcast, add a comment to this blog post. Thanks for listening.

Teaching American History

Charles Calhoun's first talk at the 2008 Teaching American History program was entitled "Why Are Some Biographies So Good?" What do you think of Charles' answer to that question, and what would your answer be? Please leave your thoughts here.

Views of the East

Bowdoin sociologist Nancy Riley spoke at the 2008 Views of the East program about family and gender in contemporary China. Please leave your feedback on her talk, or any of the others, as a comment on this blog post. Thanks!

Miriam Colwell

Miriam Colwell was born in Prospect Harbor in 1917 and still lives in the house built by her great-great-grandfather in 1817. She is the author of Wind Off the Water (1945), Day of the Trumpet (1947), and Young (1955). As a small town resident and long-time postmistress, she has watched change upon change wash over the fabled coast for nearly nine decades. She explores those themes in her fourth novel, Contentment Cove (Islandport Press, 2008), which is set in a Down East coastal village in the 1950s, when social clashes and changing values were starting to tear at the fabric of Maine’s traditional way of life.

Helen Nearing

Scholar Mimi Killinger researched the life of homesteader and writer Helen Nearing for her doctoral dissertation in American History. Her dissertation became the biography The Good Life of Helen K. Nearing (University of Vermont Press, 2007). Here, Killinger recounts the inspiration for her project at the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, and reads excerpts from the biography. Killinger earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maine, where she is now Rezendes Preceptor for the Arts at the Honors College.

To learn more about the Nearings, visit the Good Life Center or the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.

Robert Coffin

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin was a native Mainer, Bowdoin College graduate, and longtime Bowdoin faculty member. Though popular writer and speaker in his time, his work is not widely known today. In this podcast episode, Kevin Belmonte, who recently completed a Master’s thesis on Coffin for the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine, considers why. In the process, he shares pieces of Coffin’s correspondance and reads three poems aloud. Belmonte lives in York, Maine, where his family has resided since the 1630s. He is the author of William Wilberforce, A Hero for Humanity (Zondervan/HarperCollins, 2007), for which he received the John Pollock Award for Christian Biography. He has served as a script consultant for the BBC and PBS.

Permission to read Coffin’s poems in this episode was generously granted by the Estate of Robert P. Tristram Coffin. We were also assisted by the staff at the George J. Mitchell Dept. of Special Collections & Archives at Bowdoin, where Coffin's papers are held. To leave your feedback, please add a comment to this post.

Neil Rolde

Neil Rolde's 2006 book, Continental Liar from the State of Maine, is a biography of James G. Blaine, the Maine politician who dominated the American political stage from just before the Civil War and almost until the twentieth century. A former Maine politician himself, Rolde is a prize-winning historian and author of Unsettled Past, Unsettled Future: The Story of Maine Indians; The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine's Wildlands; Maine, Down East and Different; and many other books. A former Board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and won the Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2005.

Feel free to leave your thoughts on Rolde's book as a comment on this blog post. Thanks!

Jeff Shaara

The Steel Wave is the second novel in what will be a trilogy of World War II stories by Jeff Shaara, who has also written about the Civil War, the American Revolution, the Mexican War, and the first World War. Shaara is the son of the late Michael Shaara, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Killer Angels, and got his start as a novelist when he was asked to write both a sequel and a prequel to his father's bestseller.

Please leave your feedback on this Brown Bag Lecture from the Portland Public Library here.