Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Maine
Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith was the first in Congress to stand up to the bullying of Joe McCarthy.
There’s a lot more to the often overlooked mid-coastal Maine than lobster. but the lobster is amazing.
Small, handsome, and often beleaguered this surprisingly cosmopolitan Maine city has had a history of clawing its wav baclk from oblivion—and today,it’s on an upswing again
I moved to Portland four years ago for a simple reason: After years of living and working in New York City, I was suddenly tired of the incessant noise. Portland seemed to offer me, a nature-loving city person, the best of both worlds. Read more >>
A small but dependable pleasure of travel is encountering such blazons of civic pride as “Welcome to the City of Cheese, Chairs, Children, and Churches!”
Stephen Vincent Benét confessed that he had fallen in love with American placenames, and George R. Read more >>
When their side lost the Revolution, New Englanders who had backed Britain packed up, sailed north, and established the town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick. It still flourishes.
When in 1783 it became clear that a band of American rebels had succeeded in their insurrection against King George, Robert Pagan and 443 of his neighbors in Castine, Maine, did the only thing loyal subjects of the Crown could do: they dismantled their houses and pubs, board by Read more >>
The richly embellished account book of an eighteenth-century sea captain, newly discovered in a Maine attic
IN JUNE OF 1976 THE MAINE MARITIME Museum in Bath received a letter addressed simply to “The Curator.” It was from two local women named Carrie Groves and Gladys Castner and described some nautical material including a “large color drawing Read more >>
… you could battle for clean government, champion virtue, improve the public school, defend the consumer, arbitrate taste, and write lean, telling prose. Or at least that was the author’s dream. Here’s the reality.
It was three in the morning, two days after St. Patrick’s Day, 1958, when I disembarked from a Greyhound bus and stepped into the snowdrifts at the entrance to the Kennebunk Inn, in Kennebunk, Maine. Read more >>
The Passion of Percy Baxter—
A penny pincher who gave away millions, a governor who ordered the state’s flags lowered to half-mast upon his dog’s death, a lifelong bachelor who was the attentive escort of beautiful women, an animal lover who sent stray dogs to prison as companions for the inmates—Percival Read more >>
From a way Down East came a stench of politics and potatoes, and news of a border incident that true patriots will long remember as
The traveller who leaves Maine on Route 6 and enters New Brunswick at Centreville encounters a curious monument beside the road only fifty feet inside the Canadian border. Read more >>