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More About This Textbook
Overview
From the colonial period, Portland has been defined by its diverse array of peoples. Native American inhabitants possessed a strong sense of place rooted in spiritual beliefs, environmental practices, and tribal lore. Puritans, Quakers, and Baptists brought religious diversity to Colonial Falmouth (one of several early names for Portland). By the late eighteenth century, free blacks formed an important community. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish immigrants made their way to Portland. Today, more recent immigrants include individuals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In addition, Portland has a thriving gay community.
Geography, history, and public policy all shaped modern Portland. The core of the city is on a peninsula with a protected harbor on Casco Bay. Across time, Portland residents have exploited geography to develop a natural resource economy. Portland has been a fur trading post, a fishing center, a lumbering and shipbuilding community, a commercial entrepot, and a tourist destination. Portland's proximity to the sea has been the overriding factor in its development, and is a central theme of the historical essays in this volume.
A model of contemporary place studies, Creating Portland brings together essays by fourteen scholars on the history, geography, arts, literature, and built environment of Portland over the course of three centuries. Illuminating Portland within the larger context of New England regionalism, and unified by a focus on Portland as a living, changing urban center, Creating Portland is an invaluable guide to the city and a resource for scholars, students, residents, and tourists.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
"Creating Portland is a benchmark publication, of a kind that many of us in the field, as well as general readers, have been craving for decades... this saga is packed with fresh information and ideas, and is a joy to read." --Portland Press Herald"[A]n eclectic, informative, and often illuminating history that is pulled together by Conforti's introduction and epilogue, which highlight the continuities and recurring themes that emerge and fill in the gaps between essays . . . Rich in information and detail, and offering focused rather than wide-ranging analyses and interpretations, Creating Portland... enhance[s] our historical knowledge and understanding of... Maine communities as well as of the statewide and regional context in which those communities evolved." --The New England Quarterly
"As Portland has become a popular destination for a weekend or permanent getaway, the essays published in Creating Portland provide insights into how and why it became so. Topics include the city's early history, its role as a commercial center, and the creation of its urban landscape." --Boston Globe
" . . . exceedingly readable . . . fascinating . . . the sort of book one underlines and makes notes in when planning to actually go somewhere. Whether you go or not, this one is a star."--Courier-Gazette (ME)
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Table of Contents
Picturing Place: Portland and the Visual Arts - Donna M. Cassidy Writing Portland: Literature and the Production of Place - Kent C. Ryden Working Portland: Women, Class, and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century - Eileen Eagan
"What They Lack in Numbers": Locating Black Portland, 1870-1930 - Maureen Elgersman Lee Creating and Preserving Portland's Urban Landscape, 1885-1925 - Earle G. Shettleworth Jr.
From Declining Seaport to Liberty City: Portland During Depression and War - Joel W. Eastman Creating a "Gay Mecca": Lesbians and Gay Men in Late-Twentieth-Century Portland - Howard M. Solomon Epilogue: Maine, New England, and American City - Joseph A. Conforti Contributors Index