In 1884 Republican James G. Blaine came within 1,047 votes of becoming the President of the United States. This was the margin by which he lost New York State—and thus the election—to Grover Cleveland in what has been called "the dirtiest campaign in American history." Yet his career—arguably the most sensational of any American politician of the so-called Gilded Age—did not end there. He was twice U.S. secretary of state, credited with having started our country on the path to acting like a world power, a powerful speaker of the house in Congress, and a United States senator from his adopted State of Maine.

He was also, in the eyes of his opponents, "The Continental Liar From the State of Maine" or "Slippery Jim"—a sort of "amiable Tricky Dick Nixon," as he's been later called. He was hated by certain members of his own party, yet loved by millions of others, including some of his enemies in the Democratic Party. The press called him "The Magnetic Man," due to his charisma, and another nickname was the "Plumed Knight." Blaine and his wife, the former Harriet Stanwood of Augusta, knew most of the important Americans of the time—Lincoln, Harrison, Garfield, Carnegie, Roosevelt, and many others. This is the fascinating biography of a man who dominated the American political stage, starting just before the Civil War and continuing almost until the twentieth century....

The headlines have been full of controversy over casinos, racinos, land claims settlements, and sovereign rights for Native Americans in Maine—and it’s likely that we’ll be talking about these complex issues for some time yet. A capable historian with an enjoyable narrative style, Neil Rolde puts these controversies in context by telling the larger story of Maine Indians since earliest times.

There are many generous voices in this book, sharing their stories and hopes and fears. It’s a privilege to listen to them and broaden our understanding of the issues faced by Native Americans in Maine....

From its earliest beginnings, the land that became Maine produced adventurous inhabitants who went outside its boundaries to do interesting things that sometimes made them famous or even infamous. The inspiration for this book came from the tiny Pacific island of Kosrae in Micronesia, where Brewer native and Bangor Theological Seminary graduate the Reverend Galen Snow converted all of the natives to Christianity, and Portlander Harry Skillins left a record as a vicious pirate and who sired a line of descendants by native women. Others in these twenty chapters are far better known, such as poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay, opera singer Lillian Nordica, and Hollywood movie director John Ford. But whether it is Woolwich's Sir William Phips, the wilderness shepherd boy who went to sea and found a Spanish treasure and was knighted by the king of England, or Brunswick's Asa Simpson, the forty-niner who built a lumber and shipping empire in Oregon, or John Frank Stevens of West Bath, the noted engineer who made the Panama Canal possible, or Franklin County's Mark Walker, a 1930s' radical during the Great Depression, these stories, varied as they are, provide a continuous range of Mainers' contributions to the world at large. Told chronologically from the time of pre-history Indians in Maine, they end in the present with a look at our current connections overseas and at several Maine women who have dedicated their lives to helping the poor in Central and South America....