Offshore fishermen and skillful shipbuilders transformed the quiet shores of the Pemaquid Peninsula beginning in 1815. The maritime economy drove local commerce until enterprising locals turned to ice harvesting, granite quarrying, brick making, lobster canning and pogy oil processing before summer tourism grew and thrived. The descendants of revolutionaries became the faces of a more prosperous generation--men like Albert Thorpe, who ran a popular summer hotel on the grounds where his grandfather had salted and dried his catch decades earlier. Today, summer rusticators discover the enduring natural beauty at the heart of the Pemaquid Peninsula. Journey to the past with Pemaquid native and historian Josh Hanna as he discovers these timeless shores.

The first comprehensive history of Maine to be published in decades, Maine: The Pine Tree State surveys the region's rich history from prehistoric times to the early 1990s. Drawing on a team of twenty-six scholars with a professional interest in Maine's past, the book features fresh research and new interpretations of even familiar periods such as the Civil War. The chapter authors are respected authorities in Maine history from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and the various sub-disciplines of history: political, cultural, economic, labor, military, maritime. Certain themes recur from chapter to chapter and across historical periods. For example, larger structural changes in the nation - market trends, wars, economic fluctuations, demographic flows - strongly affected the everyday world of Maine people. Other prominent themes are the importance of geography and the environment in shaping Maine's economy and culture. Caught up at times in national events, Maine has also led the nation in important ways. Its fishing industry fed and its textile industry clothed the nation's people. Maine loggers contributed heavily to the technologies used in cutting, hauling, and driving timber. Maine excelled in the production of wooden ships and supplied the expertise to sail them. In the nineteenth century Maine's political leaders were among the most powerful in the nation, and Maine's contribution to social reform attracted national recognition.

This detailed exploration of the settlement of Maine beginning in the late eighteenth century illuminates the violent, widespread contests along the American frontier that served to define and complete the American Revolution. Taylor shows how Maine's militant settlers organized secret companies to defend their populist understanding of the Revolution.

A quarterly journal of maritime history.