The territory of Maine has been inhabited by Indigenous populations for thousands of years after the glaciers retreated during the last ice age. At the time of European arrival, several Algonquian-speaking nations governed the area and these nations are now known as the Wabanaki Confederacy. The first European settlement in the area was by the French in 1604 on Saint Croix Island, founded by Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons. The first English settlement was the short-lived Popham Colony, established by the Plymouth Company in 1607. A number of English settlements were established along the coast of Maine in the 1620s, although the rugged climate and conflict with the local Indigenous people caused many to fail. As Maine entered the 18th century, only a half dozen European settlements had survived. Loyalist and Patriot forces contended for Maine's territory during the American Revolution. During the War of 1812, the largely undefended eastern region of Maine was occupied by British forces with the goal of annexing it to Canada via the Colony of New Ireland, but returned to the United States following failed British offensives on the northern border, mid-Atlantic and south which produced a peace treaty that restored the pre-war boundaries. Maine was part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts until 1820 when it voted to secede from Massachusetts to become a separate state. On March 15, 1820, under the Missouri Compromise, it was admitted to the Union as the 23rd state.
A commemorative coin craze in 1936 saw some coins authorized by the United States Congress that were of mainly local significance; the York County issue was one of these. Legislation permitting the half dollar passed Congress without opposition in the first half of 1936. Maine artist Walter H. Rich designed the issue; his work has garnered mixed praise and dislike from numismatic authors. (Full article...)
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Portrait of Willis by Mathew Brady studios, circa mid-1850s
Nathaniel Parker Willis (January 20, 1806 – January 20, 1867), also known as N. P. Willis, was an American writer, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister Sara wrote under the name Fanny Fern. Harriet Jacobs wrote her autobiography while being employed as his children's nurse.
Born in Portland, Maine, Willis came from a family of publishers. His grandfather Nathaniel Willis owned newspapers in Massachusetts and Virginia, and his father Nathaniel Willis was the founder of Youth's Companion, the first newspaper specifically for children. Willis developed an interest in literature while attending Yale College and began publishing poetry. After graduation, he worked as an overseas correspondent for the New York Mirror. He eventually moved to New York and began to build his literary reputation. Working with multiple publications, he was earning about $100 per article and between $5,000 and $10,000 per year. In 1846, he started his own publication, the Home Journal, which was eventually renamed Town & Country. Shortly after, Willis moved to a home on the Hudson River where he lived a semi-retired life until his death in 1867. (Full article...)
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Neal Dow (March 20, 1804 – October 2, 1897) was an American Prohibition advocate and politician. Nicknamed the "Napoleon of Temperance" and the "Father of Prohibition", Dow was born to a Quaker family in Portland, Maine. From a young age, he believed alcohol to be the cause of many of society's problems and wanted to ban it through legislation. In 1850, Dow was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union, and the next year he was elected mayor of Portland. Soon after, largely due to Dow's efforts, the state legislature banned the sale and production of alcohol in what became known as the Maine law. Serving twice as mayor of Portland, Dow enforced the law with vigor and called for increasingly harsh penalties for violators. In 1855, his opponents rioted and he ordered the state militia to fire on the crowd. One man was killed and several wounded, and when public reaction to the violence turned against Dow, he chose not to seek reelection.
Dow was later elected to two terms in the Maine House of Representatives, but retired after a financial scandal. He joined the Union Army shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, eventually attaining the rank of brigadier general. He was wounded at the siege of Port Hudson and later captured. After being exchanged for another officer in 1864, Dow resigned from the military and devoted himself once more to prohibition. He spoke across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain in support of the cause. In 1880, Dow headed the Prohibition Party ticket for President of the United States. After losing the election, he continued to write and speak on behalf of the prohibition movement for the rest of his life until his death in Portland at the age of 93. (Full article...)
Smith attracted extensive media attention in both countries as a "Goodwill Ambassador", becoming known as America's Youngest Ambassador and subsequently participating in peacemaking activities in Japan. With the assistance of her father, Arthur (an academic), she wrote a book titled Journey to the Soviet Union, which chronicled her visit to the country. She later became a child actress, hosting a child-oriented special on the 1984 United States presidential election for The Disney Channel and playing a co-starring role in the television series Lime Street. Smith died at the age of 13 in 1985, onboard Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808, which crashed short of the runway on final approach to the Auburn/Lewiston Municipal Airport in Maine. (Full article...)
Darabont purchased the film rights to King's story in 1987, but development did not begin until five years later, when he wrote the script over an eight-week period. Two weeks after submitting his script to Castle Rock Entertainment, Darabont secured a $25 million budget to produce The Shawshank Redemption, which started pre-production in January 1993. While the film is set in Maine, principal photography took place from June to August 1993 almost entirely in Mansfield, Ohio, with the Ohio State Reformatory serving as the eponymous penitentiary. The project attracted many stars for the role of Andy, including Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, and Kevin Costner. Thomas Newman provided the film's score. (Full article...)
After graduating from Williams College, Brown joined the family corporation, then known as the Berlin Mills Company, and became manager of the Woods Products Division, overseeing the company's woodlands and logging operations. He became an early advocate for sustainable forest management practices, was a member of the New Hampshire Forestry Commission from 1909 until 1952, and served on the boards of several forestry organizations. As chair of the Forestry Commission, Brown helped send sawmills to Europe during World War I to assist the war effort. He was influenced by the Progressive movement, instituting employee benefits such as company-sponsored care for injured workers that predated modern workers' compensation laws. As a Republican, he served as a presidential elector for New Hampshire in 1924. (Full article...)
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The unnamed hurricane at peak intensity on November 1
The 1991 Perfect Storm, also known as The No-Name Storm (especially in the years immediately after it took place) and the Halloween Gale/Storm, was a damaging and deadly nor'easter in October 1991. Initially an extratropical cyclone, the storm absorbed Hurricane Grace to its south and evolved into a small unnamed hurricane later in its life. Damage from the storm totaled over $200 million (1991 USD) and thirteen people were killed in total, six of which were an outcome of the sinking of Andrea Gail, which inspired the book and later movie, The Perfect Storm. The nor'easter received the name, playing off the common expression, after a conversation between Boston National Weather Service forecaster Robert Case and author Sebastian Junger.
The initial area of low pressure developed off the coast of Atlantic Canada on October 28. Forced southward by a ridge to its north, it reached its peak intensity as a large and powerful cyclone. The storm lashed the east coast of the United States with high waves and coastal flooding before turning to the southwest and weakening. Moving over warmer waters, the system transitioned into a subtropical cyclone before becoming a tropical storm. It executed a loop off the Mid-Atlantic states and turned toward the northeast. On November 1, the system evolved into a full-fledged hurricane, with peak sustained winds of 75 miles per hour (120 km/h), although the National Hurricane Center left it unnamed to avoid confusion amid media interest in the precursor extratropical storm. The system was the twelfth and final tropical cyclone, the eighth tropical storm, and fourth hurricane in the 1991 Atlantic hurricane season. The tropical system weakened, striking Nova Scotia as a tropical storm before dissipating. (Full article...)
This is a Good article, an article that meets a core set of high editorial standards.
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Big Blood in 2011 L to R: Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella
Big Blood is an American band formed in South Portland, Maine, in 2006. The band's music fuses psychedelic folk, experimental rock, and an eclectic array of other styles and influences. Big Blood originated as a husband-and-wife duo of Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin, who had previously been bandmates together in Cerberus Shoal. They formed Big Blood shortly after the birth of their daughter, Quinnisa Rose Kinsella Mulkerin, who began featuring in the band's recordings in 2010 and later became a full-fledged member.
Big Blood has self-released most of their recordings with unique handmade packaging, although starting with their 2010 album Dead Songs they have also distributed some albums through independent record labels. The band has also made most of their discography available to freely stream or download via the Free Music Archive. Big Blood is regarded as a mainstay of the 21st-century underground music scene in New England and they have garnered an international cult following. Music critic Byron Coley wrote in 2017 that Big Blood had "long been one of the most belovedly strange outfits in the sonic universe revolving around Portland, Maine." (Full article...)
Samuel S. Brannan (March 2, 1819 – May 5, 1889) was an American settler, businessman, journalist, and prominent Mormon who founded the California Star, the first newspaper in San Francisco, California. He is also considered the first to publicize the California Gold Rush and was California's first millionaire. He used the profits from his stores to buy large tracts of real estate. He helped form the first vigilance committee in San Francisco and was disfellowshiped from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) because of his actions within the vigilance committee. Brannan's wife divorced him and he was forced to liquidate much of his real estate to pay her one-half of their assets. He died poor and in relative obscurity. (Full article...)
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Nichols in 2012
Rachel Nichols is an American actress and model. Nichols began modeling while attending Columbia University in New York City in the late 1990s, and transitioned into acting by the early 2000s; she had a part in the romantic drama Autumn in New York (2000) and a one-episode role in the fourth season of Sex and the City (2002). Her first major role was in the comedy Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2003), and she went on to achieve wider recognition playing Rachel Gibson in the final season of the action television series Alias (2005–2006) and for her role in the horror film The Amityville Horror (2005).
Robert Deniston Hume (October 31, 1845 – November 25, 1908) was a cannery owner, pioneer hatchery operator, politician, author, and self-described "pygmy monopolist" who controlled salmon fishing for 32 years on the lower Rogue River in U.S. state of Oregon. Born in Augusta, Maine, and reared by foster parents on a farm, Hume moved at age 18 to San Francisco to join a salmon-canning business started by two of his brothers. They later re-located to Astoria on the Columbia River, where they prospered. After the death of his first wife and their two young children, Hume moved again and started anew in Gold Beach, at the mouth of the Rogue.
In 1877 Hume bought rights to a Rogue River fishery, then built a salmon cannery and many other structures and acquired all of the tidelands bordering the lower 12 miles (19 km) of the river. He remarried, invested in a small fleet of ships and a salmon hatchery and expanded his business interests to include a store, hotel, newspaper, and many other enterprises in Gold Beach and in the nearby community of Wedderburn, which he founded. Canning, shipping, and selling hundreds of tons of salmon over the years, he became known as the Salmon King of Oregon. (Full article...)
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Grace Harriet Macurdy (September 12, 1866 – October 23, 1946) was an American classicist, and the first American woman to gain a PhD from Columbia University. She taught at Vassar College for 44 years, despite a lengthy conflict with Abby Leach, her first employer.
Macurdy eventually rose to become chair of the department of Greek before embarking upon an illustrious international career. One of her major areas of research was royal women during the Hellenistic period. Macurdy shaped the field of classics and the study of ancient history by pulling together both material evidence and textual evidence as sources in her pioneering studies of individual women. (Full article...)
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Herbert L. Mitchell Jr. (June 18, 1937 – January 4, 2011), credited as Herb Mitchell and sometimes Herb L. Mitchell, was an American actor, director, and teacher. He was a stockbroker before he made the switch to acting, appearing in films; stage plays such as The Fiddler on the Roof, in which he played the lead role of Tevye; television shows including The Practice, on which he had a recurring role; and commercials, including ones for stock brokerage firms Dean Witter Reynolds and Paine Webber. He was married twice and had five children. (Full article...)
Howard Kern Day (born January 15, 1981) is an American singer-songwriter. Beginning his career as a solo artist in the late 1990s, Day became known for his extensive touring and in-concert use of samplers and effects pedals to accompany himself. He self-financed and self-released his first album, Australia, in 2000.
Day eventually signed a recording contract with major label Epic Records in 2002 and has since re-released his debut as well as producing a follow-up, Stop All The World Now. Despite initially sluggish sales, Stop All The World Now was certified gold in early 2005, and has produced a number of singles, including the hits "She Says" and "Collide", Day's most successful to date. "Collide" later became Day's first platinum single, eventually selling 1.5 million downloads. (Full article...)
This list was generated from these rules. Questions and feedback are always welcome! The search is being run daily with the most recent ~14 days of results. Note: Some articles may not be relevant to this project.
The list below, for each city, shows the population in 2010, the population estimate of 2019, the growth/shrinking percentage between the three, and the date of incorporation as a city.