Author Harry Gratwick creates intimate and detailed portraits of these Mainers, from the controversial missionary Sebastien Râle to Woolwich native William Phips, whose seafaring attacks against French Canada earned him the first governorship of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Gratwick also profiles inventors who “challenged the assumptions of [their] time and place,” such as Robert Benjamin Lewis, an African American from Gardiner who patented a hair growth product in the 1830s, and Margaret Knight, a York native who defied nineteenth-century sexism to earn the nickname “the female Edison.”
Discover four hundred years of Maine’s history through the tales of its unique residents, from soprano Lillian Nordica, who left Farmington to become the most glamorous American opera singer of her day, to slugger George “Piano Legs” Gore, the only Mainer to have ever won a Major League batting championship.
Background Information
Maine was still part of Massachusetts at the time of the Revolution, but soon separated and was admitted as a state. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was chartered in England and included the settlements near Boston.