For over two centuries, many a helmsman felt a surge of deliverance upon first spotting the Quoddy Lighthouse, guardian of the easternmost point of the United States. During the foggy summer months, residents of Lubec take comfort in the symphony of tolling bells and crashing surf along the rocky Maine coast, where Native Americans once hunted seals and generations of fishermen tugged their boats ashore. In this collection of articles, historian Ronald Pesha revives the events and people of Lubec's past, uncovering stories such as the eighteenth-century naval hero and founder of the U.S. Coast Guard, Hopley Yeaton, and the nineteenth-century Lubec signature quilt. From the Quoddy Belle's California gold mine expedition to the colorful history of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Cat Food house, these tales from Lubec history will delight all readers.

In 1897, a stranger named Reverend Prescott Jernegan arrived in Lubec and made a bold claim: he could extract gold from seawater. To do so, he used so-called accumulators of electrically charged rods in iron pots. Fooling many, he actually hid the gold beneath a wharf in the Bay of Fundy during the night. He and his accomplice, Charles Fisher, preached with fervent enthusiasm as they built their factory and encouraged inspections, which reversed doubters to greedy high-stakes investors. Hundreds of laborers accelerated factory expansion until July 1897, when Jernegan and Fisher fled. Although residents of Lubec attempted civil and criminal action, both men relocated, and fantasies of gold wealth flowed away. Relive the excitement, disappointment and anger of turn-of-the-century Mainers in this collection of accounts about the Lubec gold hoax.

The life of Benedict Arnold, the American Revolutionary War general who attempted to surrender West Point to the British in 1780, didn't end after he betrayed his American compatriots. In the newly formed United States, he was condemned as a conspirator and in Britain, he was suspected of the same. He quickly left America, spent a short time in London, and largely operated in Canada and the Caribbean as a smuggler, a mercenary and a pariah. Although much has been written about Arnold's famous fall from grace, this book is the story of a charismatic man of vaulting ambition. With new research and photographs, it delves into his last twenty years. Arnold remains fascinating as a toppled hero and a flagrant traitor. Another American general wrote in the 1780s that Arnold "never does anything by halves"; indeed, he lived on a big scale. This study documents each of the various points of the globe where the restless Arnold operated and lived, pursuing wealth, status, and redemption.

Celebrate the bicentennial of Maine statehood. Historian Tom Huntington covers the course of Maine’s often turbulent history, decade by decade. He writes about the death of Congressman Jonathan Cilley in a duel; the Portland Rum Riot and the birth of Prohibition; the Confederate raid on Portland Harbor; James G. Blaine’s scandal-ridden try for the presidency; the triumph and tragedy of Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American to play major league baseball; Sangerville native Hiram Maxim’s transformation of modern war; Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 visit to Maine (and the Portland resident who became the first person to stowaway on a transatlantic flight); the bloody shootout that killed gangster Al Brady in Bangor; the German saboteurs who came ashore on Mt. Desert Island during World War II; Margaret Chase Smith’s principled stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy; Samantha Smith’s plea for world peace; the arrival of Somali immigrants in Lewiston; and much, much more. It’s an entertaining and informative look at key events, milestones and personalities from two fascinating centuries of statehood.

Places are imagined, made, claimed, fought for and defended, and always in a state of becoming. This important book explores the historical and theoretical relationships among place, community, and public memory across differing chronologies and geographies within twentieth-century Canada. It is a collaborative work that shifts the focus from nation and empire to local places sitting at the intersection of public memory making and identity formation � main streets, city squares and village museums, internment camps, industrial wastelands, and the landscape itself. With a focus on the materiality of image, text, and artefact, the essays gathered here argue that every act of memory making is simultaneously an act of forgetting; every place memorialized is accompanied by places forgotten.

This was obviously a labor of love for the author. Libraries large and small will find it a major ready-reference source on historic women in America. Library Journal