What We’re Reading

Thirteen patrons joined us for History Room Live yesterday. It was a casual “Coffee Hour” session where we shared and discussed books we’ve been reading.

Our books weren’t limited to local history and genealogy topics, but certain themes emerged, including United States history, Black history, activisim, and maritime life.


Here are 21 books that came up in the course of discussion:

Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard, 2020

The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard, 2004

The Campaigns of the First Maine and First District of Columbia Cavalry by Samuel Hill Merrill, 1866

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George, 2016

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer, 2009

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, 1990

The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People by Dan Buettner, 2015

The Alienist by Caleb Carr, 1994

Liberty’s Exiles by Maya Jasonoff, 2011

The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael Twitty

Jane Addams: Spirit in Action by Louise W. Knight, 2010

Related: Frances Perkins: The Life and Legacy of FDR’s Secretary of Labor & The Relevance of Her Work Today, Maine Calling, July 15, 2020.

The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century by Martha Elizabeth Hodes, 2006

Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail by W. Jeffrey Bolster, 1997

The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail by W. Jeffrey Bolster, 2012

The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir by Samantha Power, 2019

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, 2018

The Road to Down Street: The Story of North Bath by Nancy Dearborn Lovetere, 2011

The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History by John R. Gillis, 2012

The Library Book by Susan Orlean, 2018

Black Bangor: African Americans in a Maine Community, 1880-1950 by Maureen Elgersman Lee, 2005

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England by Jean M. O’Brien, 2010

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist, 2014

Shipmates: A Tale of the Seafaring Women of New England by Isabel Hopestill Carter, 1934

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