Thursday, May 30 to Saturday, June 1, 2019
The University of Maine is proud to have hosted the Maine Statehood and Bicentennial Conference from May 30 to June 1, 2019. The two hundredth anniversary of statehood provides a unique opportunity to engage the distant past and to reflect on the ongoing relationship between the statehood era (1780s-1820s) and the present.
This online archive includes links below to videos of all seven scholarly panels at the conference as well as its keynote event with two Pulitzer-Prize winning historians and the opening concert by the DaPonte String Quartet. Panel and paper abstracts as well as printed material from the conference are also accessible. The Bicentennial Overview link leads to two videos by UMaine History Professor Liam Riordan: a 3-minute overview produced by UMaine Marketing and a 53-minute lecture about past-present connections from the statehood era delivered on campus in Orono in February 2018. Last, we thank the many financial sponsors who made the conference possible.
You can also access here the Call for Papers: Maine in the Statehood Era (ca. 1780s-1820s) and its Commemoration and Legacy.
Additional resources for the Maine State Bicentennial include:
- UMaine Today special edition, Maine turns 200: 'the past, present and future remain intertwined' including the articles: Struggling for statehood, Women of Maine, Politics of slavery, The climate, and Cake, and other sweet confections
- State of Maine Bicentennial Commission, especially for upcoming events: https://www.maine200.org
- The Maine Historical Society’s Maine Memory Network, especially for an interpretive account of statehood and digitized original material: https://www.mainememory.net/bicentennial
- Fogler Library's digital collection of original material from the statehood era: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mainebicentennial/