Maine Memory Network

Letter from Wendell Phillips to Elizabeth Mountfort, April 19, 1850

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1850-04-19 Location: Portland Media: Ink on paper

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Downtown, Phillips, ca. 1880

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: circa 1880 Location: Phillips Media: Photographic print

Dwelling, Phillips Street, Portland, 1924

Owner in 1924: Joseph Ouelette Use: Dwelling - Single family

Phillips property, W. Side Ryefield Street, Peaks Island, Portland, 1924

Owner in 1924: Abba M. Phillips Use: Summer Dwelling

Phillips Rural School Buiding & Outhouse, Phillips, 1897

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1897 Location: Phillips Client: Town of Phillips Architect: Coombs, Gibbs, and Wilkinson Architects

Phillips National Bank, Phillips, ca. 1920

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: circa 1920 Location: Phillips Client: unknown Architect: Harry S. Coombs

Otisfield's One-Room Schoolhouses

Many of the one-room schoolhouses in Otisfield, constructed from 1839 through the early twentieth century, are featured here. The photos, most of which also show teachers and children, were taken between 1898 and 1998.

William King

Maine's first governor, William King, was arguably the most influential figure in Maine's achieving statehood in 1820. Although he served just one year as the Governor of Maine, he was instrumental in establishing the new state's constitution and setting up its governmental infrastructure.

Phillips Historical Society

View collections, facts, and contact information for this Contributing Partner.

Surry by the Bay - Surry Village School

"One memorable event occurred when Phillip Soderquist, a teacher, applied a good right hook to a young tough from picking on smaller kids on the…"

Vegetarians and Zoonosis
by Avery Yale Kamila

Colds, influenza, tuberculosis, measles, smallpox, plague and COVID-19 group under zoonotic diseases

From Pee Wee to Pro The Maine Way
by Danny Bolduc

I am the very first person from Maine to have played hockey in the Olympics and in the NHL.

Longfellow Studies: Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith" and "Whitman's Song of Myself" - Alternative Constructions of the American Worker

Grade Level: 9-12 Content Area: English Language Arts, Social Studies
Most if not all of us have or will need to work in the American marketplace for at least six decades of our lives. There's a saying that I remember a superintendent telling a group of graduating high-school seniors: remember, when you are on your deathbed, you will not be saying that you wish you had spent more time "at the office." But Americans do spend a lot more time working each year than nearly any other people on the planet. By the end of our careers, many of us will have spent more time with our co-workers than with our families. Already in the 21st century, much has been written about the "Wal-Martization" of the American workplace, about how, despite rocketing profits, corporations such as Wal-Mart overwork and underpay their employees, how workers' wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s, while the costs of college education and health insurance have risen out of reach for many citizens. It's become a cliché to say that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" is widening to an alarming degree. In his book Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips says we are dangerously close to becoming a plutocracy in which one dollar equals one vote. Such clashes between employers and employees, and between our rhetoric of equality of opportunity and the reality of our working lives, are not new in America. With the onset of the industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, many workers were displaced from their traditional means of employment, as the country shifted from a farm-based, agrarian economy toward an urban, manufacturing-centered one. In cities such as New York, groups of "workingmen" (early manifestations of unions) protested, sometimes violently, unsatisfactory labor conditions. Labor unions remain a controversial political presence in America today. Longfellow and Whitman both wrote with sympathy about the American worker, although their respective portraits are strikingly different, and worth juxtaposing. Longfellow's poem "The Village Blacksmith" is one of his most famous and beloved visions: in this poem, one blacksmith epitomizes characteristics and values which many of Longfellow's readers, then and now, revere as "American" traits. Whitman's canto (a section of a long poem) 15 from "Song of Myself," however, presents many different "identities" of the American worker, representing the entire social spectrum, from the crew of a fish smack to the president (I must add that Whitman's entire "Song of Myself" is actually 52 cantos in length). I do not pretend to offer these single texts as all-encompassing of the respective poets' ideas about workers, but these poems offer a starting place for comparison and contrast. We know that Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century, just as we know that Whitman came to be one of the most controversial. Read more widely in the work of both poets and decide for yourselves which poet speaks to you more meaningfully and why.