What’s Happened: History Archives - Maine Humanities Council

Assistant Professor of History, University of Southern Maine

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Ashley Towle is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Maine. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth century United States history, the history of enslavement and emancipation, and the history of gender and sexuality.

Dr. Towle's most recent scholarship uses death as a lens for examining shifting power relations in the post-emancipation South. Analyzing funerals, cemeteries, and monuments, Dr. Towle explores how white and Black Southerners made sense of the mortal losses of the Civil War era.

Talks

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower in Fact and Fiction

How did the history of slavery and Jim Crow influence Octavia Butler’s groundbreaking book, Parable of the Sower? This talk explores the ways in which Butler drew on the history of enslavement and Jim Crow to craft the post-apocalyptic setting of her novel..

In exploring the connections between American history and Parable of the Sower, this talk also offers insights into how we can use the lessons of history to shape a more socially just future.

This talk is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this presentation do not necessarily represent those of the NEH.

Maine in the Civil War and Reconstruction

While the experiences of famous men such as Hannibal Hamlin and Joshua Chamberlain are well-known to many, this talk explores the lesser-known stories of white and Black Mainers who influenced the Civil War and Reconstruction. Attendees will learn about Civil War nurses, self-liberating refugees from slavery, idealistic reformers, and an imperiled Reconstruction-era governor.

Confederate Monuments and the Memory of the Civil War

This talk contextualizes current debates around the status of Confederate monuments in the United States. Rather than viewing these debates as a recent development, this talk demonstrates that these monuments have always had a controversial and contested history.

Through an examination of counter-memorials created in the South such as national cemeteries, and African-American monuments and cemeteries, this talk explores the complex and fraught historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Maine State Poet Laureate

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Julia Bouwsma is the sixth Maine State Poet Laureate (2021-2026) and author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), both of which received Maine Literary Awards. She is the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME and also teaches intermittently in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington. Bouwsma lives and works on an off-the-grid homestead in the western mountains.

Talks

Our Arms Spread Out around It All: A History of Malaga Island through Poems

In 1912 the State of Maine forcibly evicted an interracial community of roughly forty-seven people from Malaga Island, a small island off the coast of Phippsburg that had been their home for generations. The erasure of the Malaga Island community included the removal of all dwellings and the island’s schoolhouse, the involuntary commitment of nine residents to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and the exhumation and mass reburial of seventeen graves. This atrocity was followed by a century of socially-enforced silence and as a result, many Mainers today still do not fully know the story of Malaga.

This talk will pair a discussion of Malaga Island and its residents with a reading of poems from Julia Bouwsma’s award-winning collection Midden, considering the history of this shameful event, the relevancy of this history to our current moment, and also the process and implications of writing poems based on historic research.

An Introduction to Maine’s Current Poet Laureate

Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma will introduce her poetry by presenting poems from her two books, Midden and Work by Bloodlight, as well as newer poems from projects in progress. This talk, which incorporates a Q&A, will focus on the arc and progression of her work thus far, provide insight into her poetic process, consider the vital role that Maine plays in her poetry and poetic development, and explore thoughts about the particular necessity and relevance of poetry in times of isolation and division. Bouwsma will also explore her vision for the Poet Laureate position, providing an overview of recent projects designed to help Mainers gain greater comfort with poetry and connect with one another through this powerful medium.

Professor of History, University of New England

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Elizabeth DeWolfe is Professor of History at the University of New England where she teaches courses in women’s history, archival research, and American culture. Dr. DeWolfe is a historical detective: she hunts archives for the traces of ordinary women, piecing together their all-but-forgotten lives from faint clues.

Dr. DeWolfe’s book on the short life and tragic death of a textile mill girl, The Murder of Mary Bean, was named the Outstanding Book of 2008 by the New England Historical Association. She has also written on textile factory workers, the Shakers, and a Maine stenographer turned undercover detective.

Talks

The Great Turn-Out of 1841: Maine Textile Workers on Strike!

In 1841, nearly 500 female factory workers walked out of Saco’s York Manufacturing Company and paraded up Main Street, chanting and singing. They gathered in a local church, formed a committee, and sent the factory owner a document articulating their complaints about wages, housing, and paternalistic rules. In this illustrated talk, we’ll explore the life of New England “factory girls,” the opportunities mill work brought, and the challenges of this difficult labor. We’ll examine the tense days that followed the “turn-out” and see how a strike in one Maine town connected to national agitation for women’s rights, including suffrage.

Dangerous Temptations: Textile ‘Factory Girls’ in Fact and Fiction

The 1849 "murder" of textile worker Berengera Caswell shattered the tranquility of life in Saco and Biddeford. In the wake of her death, authors published over a dozen tales set in Maine factory towns. To protect Maine's young, female workforce throughout the state, short stories and novellas reviewed the "dangerous temptations" young people found in Maine's cities, and offered advice on how to avoid Caswell's tragic fate. These sensationalized, gothic stories were eagerly read cautionary tales that offered young women (and their nervous parents) guideposts to safety. But did the factory girls take the advice?

Mourning Maine's Dead : Victorian Hair Jewelry and Crafts

In 19th-century Maine, death was ever present. To grapple with loss, Victorian Mainers could turn to art and craft to mourn and remember their loved ones. Their material of choice was human hair. Mary Baker made a good living crafting flowers, wreaths, and jewelry from human hair. Her Portland home-based business tapped into a national craze for Victorian hair jewelry which not only memorialized the dead, but also connected the living. From snips of a loved one's hair in a locket, to braided hair friendship rings exchanged between schoolgirls, to a large-scale wreath of flowers containing the hair of an entire family, Mainers embraced hair art as a symbol of mourning the dead and celebrating the living.

Professor of Literature, University of Maine-Farmington

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Michael K. Johnson teaches courses in American literature, multicultural literature, and African American literature. He is the author of several books, including a biography of Montana-born African American singer Taylor Gordon, "Can’t Stand Still: Taylor Gordon and the Harlem Renaissance," published in 2019.

Along with Kalenda Eaton and Jeannette Jones, Johnson is the co-editor of “New Directions in Black Western Studies,” a special issue of the "Journal of American Studies." Most recently he is a co-editor (with Kerry Fine, Rebecca Lush, and Sara Spurgeon) of "Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre.” Johnson has been living in Maine for 22 years and is originally from Tennessee.

Talks

James Weldon Johnson and the Spirituals Revival of the 1920s

Civil rights activist and poet James Weldon Johnson was also a major figure in early twentieth-century music. Co-writer with brother J. Rosamond Johnson of the enduring anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Johnson also helped bring about a revolution in the understanding and reception of African American spirituals in the 1920s as a serious and distinctively American contribution to world folk music. My talk examines the impact of The Book of American Negro Spirituals, an anthology of spirituals collected and arranged by the Johnson brothers and promoted nationally and internationally by a series of concerts featuring tenor Taylor Gordon.

Afrofuturist Westerns

Afrofuturism looks both backwards and forwards, taking into account the realities of the African American past as it also maps out the African American future. My talk looks at the way Afrofuturist texts use the science fiction convention of time travel to reexamine an often forgotten element of American history: African American experience in the American West. Time travel adventures to the historical West help us remember Black western heroes (such as U. S. Marshal Bass Reeves) and offer new perspectives on the tragedies of Black western history (such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921).

Life Writing and the Recovery of African American History

Biographical writing has often replicated social hierarchies, telling the stories of famous figures and “great men” and ignoring the life histories of women and people of color. Drawing on my own biographical writing about the African American Gordon family (who were pioneer settlers in Montana), my talk argues for the importance of biography as means of recovering historical African American figures whose stories have been neglected. The stories of siblings Taylor and Rose Gordon, respectively a nearly-forgotten singer and a contributing writer to a Montana newspaper, reveal the value of listening for the voices that biographical writing too often doesn’t hear.