Keywords: english literature
Item 31226
Thursday Club program, Biddeford, 1897
Contributed by: McArthur Public Library Date: 1897–1898 Location: Biddeford Media: Ink on paper, ribbon
Item 68908
Virginia Porter, Farmington State Normal School, ca. 1907
Contributed by: Mantor Library at UMF Date: circa 1907 Location: Farmington Media: Photographic print
Exhibit
Longfellow: The Man Who Invented America
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a man and a poet of New England conscience. He was influenced by his ancestry and his Portland boyhood home and experience.
Exhibit
The mainspring of fashion is the process whereby members of one class imitate the styles of another, who in turn are driven to ever new expedients of fashionable change.
Site Page
"All of these tribal names are found in the early literature of the area, as well as the southern New England tribes' names for the Wabanakis --…"
Site Page
Rum, Riot, and Reform - A Call to Temperance
"… Causes of Spontaneous Combustion Journal of Literature, Science, Morals and Religion, Bangor June 29, 1837 Collections of Maine Historical…"
Lesson Plan
Maine's Acadian Community: "Evangeline," Le Grand Dérangement, and Cultural Survival
Grade Level: 9-12
Content Area: English Language Arts, Social Studies
This lesson plan will introduce students to the history of the forced expulsion of thousands of people from Acadia, the Romantic look back at the tragedy in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous epic poem Evangeline and the heroine's adoption as an Acadian cultural figure, and Maine's Acadian community today, along with their relations with Acadian New Brunswick and Nova Scotia residents and others in the Acadian Diaspora. Students will read and discuss primary documents, compare and contrast Le Grand Dérangement to other forced expulsions in Maine history and discuss the significance of cultural survival amidst hardships brought on by treaties, wars, and legislation.
Lesson Plan
Longfellow Studies: Longfellow Amongst His Contemporaries - The Ship of State DBQ
Grade Level: 9-12
Content Area: English Language Arts, Social Studies
Preparation Required/Preliminary Discussion:
Lesson plans should be done in the context of a course of study on American literature and/or history from the Revolution to the Civil War.
The ship of state is an ancient metaphor in the western world, especially among seafaring people, but this figure of speech assumed a more widespread and literal significance in the English colonies of the New World. From the middle of the 17th century, after all, until revolution broke out in 1775, the dominant system of governance in the colonies was the Navigation Acts. The primary responsibility of colonial governors, according to both Parliament and the Crown, was the enforcement of the laws of trade, and the governors themselves appointed naval officers to ensure that the various provisions and regulations of the Navigation Acts were executed. England, in other words, governed her American colonies as if they were merchant ships.
This metaphorical conception of the colonies as a naval enterprise not only survived the Revolution but also took on a deeper relevance following the construction of the Union. The United States of America had now become the ship of state, launched on July 4th 1776 and dedicated to the radical proposition that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. This proposition is examined and tested in any number of ways during the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. Novelists and poets, as well as politicians and statesmen, questioned its viability: Whither goes the ship of state? Is there a safe harbor somewhere up ahead or is the vessel doomed to ruin and wreckage? Is she well built and sturdy or is there some essential flaw in her structural frame?
