Maine Humanities Council

Margaret Chase Smith

by Jim Melcher

Margaret Chase Smith, who served Maine in Congress for 32 years, is still one of the most iconic figures in Maine political history over 15 years after her death in 1995. She remains a significant figure in American national political history as well. What can we still learn from “The Red Rose of Skowhegan”’s experience in politics almost three decades after she left the Senate in 1973? As a scholar of American politics, I tried my hand at this question at a conference titled “The Politics of Conscience: Margaret Chase Smith and Today’s Political Climate” hosted by the Maine Humanities Council at G.W.-Hinckley (formerly Good Will-Hinckley) this past September. (The podcast available here on the MHC website is from a later presentation on this topic I made in Professor Amy Fried’s class on Women and Politics at the University of Maine). I argued that not only are there ways in which we can learn from Margaret Chase Smith’s experience still holding valid today, but that there are other ways in which her experience offers a contrast to the way American politics works now.

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View from Strip Road, Fort Kent: Maine's northern border is a landscape of rolling hills, fields, and lots of sky. Credit: Erik Jorgensen

by Kathryn Olmstead

What do borders mean? It is a provocative question that captured the imaginations of participants in two discussions sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council Sept. 16 and 17. Held in the border towns of Houlton and Frenchville, the discussions brought together residents of varied ages and walks of life from both Maine and Canada to examine and expand their views of a border’s significance.

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Bruce Spang

by Bruce Spang

Coming to language was not easy for me. As a boy, the written word eluded me most of elementary school. I took third grade twice since my teacher discovered that I read from right to left, not left to right; breaking words into syllables seemed by then, and is still now, an impossible task, so I memorized whole words, looking them up so I knew on sight like an old friend. I could not take words for granted. The mundane became mysterious. I was dyslectic before there was a term for it. Back then, I was labeled “slow” and, at worse, “dumb,” because I could not figure out how words worked. I struggled mightily. But I did love words. They seem filled with mystery—like little surprises in a box of Cracker Jacks.

As a young writer, I had as much difficulty putting my words down on the page as I did reading them. In English, I was a low C student. But my sophomore year in high school, a teacher—her name was Mrs. English, oddly enough—found that I had something to say and encouraged me to write: Forget the grammar, forget the spelling (both were atrocious), just write and I did. Later in college, I kept a journal about my trip around Europe with my brother. He noted that I tended to write like a poet, using images and telling stories with twists and turns in them.

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by Erik Jorgensen, Executive Director

Update:

Thanks to Ron Bancroft for an excellent column (Tuesday May 10) about low civic awareness among American students.

I was saddened to read yesterday what has become a perennial story – the increasing lack of awareness of civic issues among American students. Saddened, yes, but surprised only by the sense of crisis in the report. For after what seems like decades of breathless accounts of high school students who don’t know what century World War Two happened in, or who wrote the Gettysburg Address, is it really a surprise to hear that eighth graders don’t know much about foreign policy, the Bill of Rights, or other civics topics?

What other outcome could be expected after a decade or more of educational priorities sidelining social studies and history as being nice but non-essential? This sort of knowledge is not gained by osmosis, and if our society does in fact think it’s important to understand the civic underpinnings of this country, there appears to be a reasonably simple solution: history and civics need to be treated as a core subject, rather than an add-on.

Almost every day, we at the Council interact with imaginative and thoughtful social studies teachers from around the state, experts who not only teach civics, but communicate their passion to their students. I don’t think the problem stems from a lack of good teachers as much as from curricular and assessment priorities that always seem to relegate history to elective status.

You show me a kid who’s been instructed by one of these teachers, and I’ll show you a citizen.

by Martina Duncan

Over 120 new friends, as well as long-time friends, of the Maine Humanities Council gathered on April 28th to celebrate  the re-release by Down East Books of Good Maine Food, a cookbook originally published in 1939 by renowned Maine author Kenneth Roberts and his niece and secretary, Marjorie Mosser. When Kenneth Roberts wrote about the food of his childhood in Trending into Maine, it kicked up a storm of recipes and recollections from readers. Roberts asked Mosser to assemble a cookbook of traditional Maine recipes, and Good Maine Food was the result. Roberts’s personal favorites are included along with those of his readers, occasionally seasoned by his characteristically pungent comments.

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Wesley McNair presents at the Blaine House, photo: Patricia O'Donnell

by Patricia O’Donnell

What a pleasure it was to sit next to Shanna McNair on a rainy Wednesday last week in the Governor’s mansion in Augusta, and watch her father, Wesley McNair, be inaugurated as Maine’s 4^th Poet Laureate. Wes has been my colleague in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maine Farmington since we both arrived in 1987, continuing past his retirement to the present, as he remains active in the Program as Writer in Residence. I settled in to enjoy the talk, knowing that—for a shy person—Wes is a consummate public speaker.  I was not disappointed.

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Carolyn Wollen (credit: Annie Medeiros)

By Carolyn Wollen

Yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure (and some discomfort) of judging the semifinalist entries for the Maine Humanities Council Letters About Literature program.  Each of the judges read the 40+ semifinalist submissions, each of them a letter to an author (living or deceased) explaining how the author’s work changed the student’s way of thinking about themselves or the world.  The submissions were separated into three student grade levels of Grades 4-6, Grades 7 and 8 and Grades 9-12.

My first read-through of the submissions a couple of weeks ago left me breathless and aching.  The courage of these young writers to put themselves literally on the line in dealing with the passions, heartbreaks and sometimes emotional violence of their lives was arresting.  We adults think we try to know and address the difficulties of the lives of the young people around us, but the rawness of the retelling of some of those experiences makes many of our efforts look limp.  At the same time, the students’ connections to books and the way they used their reading to create learnings and lifelines for themselves connected me to my own unforgettable reading experiences.  Which is why I took the time to participate in this celebration of the power of literature.
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by Kenneth Z. Chutchian

When I was five years old I wanted to write a book, but then I got really busy over the next 40 years and couldn’t find the time. I managed to write more than 2,000 bylined articles for newspapers from Greenfield, Massachusetts to Augusta, Maine, between 1979 and 1999, but that and the arduous task of being a responsible adult really cut into my book-writing aspirations. A few years ago I finished a rough draft of a novel. I joined a writing group in Windham, which helped me shred my 70,000 words into unrecognizable fragments, aborted chapters, and folders of paper that look like a TV drama crime scene, minus the body. So for these reasons and many others, I consider myself lucky to stumble upon the Maine Humanities Council’s “Teaching American History Through Biography” program. During my second summer institute, I finished a paper on John Reed that I hope to turn into my long-awaited book.

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by Carolyn Sloan

It is a dark and stormy night, so stormy, in fact, that the traffic on the turnpike slows to 55 mph between Biddeford and Kennebunkport.  I am on my way down to York Public Library to attend the last session of the Let’s Talk About It poetry series American Traditions; American Innovations.  When Baron Wormser developed the series, he designated the last session as a sharing of modern American poetry by the participants.  My own possible contribution lies on the car seat beside me.  I had attended other wonderful sessions of the series, but never this last session of sharing.  Would it work?  Would the participants be reticent?  come unprepared?

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by Tom Lizotte

The news that longtime Professor of English and American Studies Charles W. Bassett had died on Oct. 19, 2010, in Waterville came as a punch in the gut to any Colby College student who had the privilege of being in his classroom during a legendary career that stretched from 1969-2005 on Mayflower Hill.

“Charlie” was South Dakota’s gift to Colby, a son of the Great Plains who became an institution in Maine. He taught the most popular course at the college, on the 20th-century American novel. He started Colby’s highly respected American Studies program. He represented Colby on the board of the Maine Humanities Council. He was the finest teacher of his era, the one alumni recall with fondness decades later.

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