Enlisted as a Man

“She was everywhere received as a blithe, handsome, agreeable young gentleman.” –Herman Mann, The Female Review: or,
Memoirs of an American Young Lady. 1792

Deborah Sampson is famous for enlisting in the continental army during the American Revolutionary War. This is her wedding gown.

Sampson avoided discovery for eighteen months, until she contracted yellow fever and received an honorable discharge in 1783.

Girl Entrepreneurs

Breaking Free

Iconic Maine author Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) is best known for two of her major works, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and “A White Heron,” (1886).

In her day, Jewett was an internationally celebrated author. She wrote over three hundred works, including fiction, essays, and poetry.

By the late twentieth century, Jewett’s fame had declined. Much of the reason for her diminished light is the literary criticism, white-male-centered, that dominated the mid-twentieth century. Dismissed as quaint and regional, Jewett’s contribution to literature was overlooked. Recently, scholars have rediscovered her work and there is renewed interest in the deft depictions of women, the subtleties of relationships, and the feminist undertones in her work, notably her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor.

Central themes of Jewett’s work reflect her own life: often, protagonists seek to free of literal or figurative barriers, as Jewett carved out a life of literal and artistic freedom in her life, exchanging a traditional wife role for that of writer; themes of nature play strongly in transcendentalist motifs referencing Jewett’s strong connection to the natural world;  themes of community reference the importance of Jewett’s friendships, particularly female friendships in her life and as the inner circle of the private world she shared with partner and the love of her life, Annie Fields.

Sense of place—Maine in particular-- is prominent in the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, whose home in South Berwick, Maine, now a Historic New England site, was a beloved constant in her life and she once wrote that she was “made of Berwick dust.”

The Country of the Pointed Firs cover, as all Jewett’s books except the first edition of her first novel, was designed by close friend Sarah Wyman Whitman, a celebrated artist at the forefront of the Arts and Crafts Movement in New England. In this work, considered her masterpiece, Jewett writes of an independent writer protagonist who, having transcended a quest for freedom, is drawn into the world of a small Maine village—a community anchored by strong women and flavored with the stories of its people.

Eye for the Big Picture

Baldwin Coolidge (1845-1928) was a leading professional photographer in New England from the late 1870s until 1917. With his large-format cameras, he recorded urban life and architecture in Boston and other New England cities, coastal and marine views in Massachusetts and Maine, pastoral scenes in New Hampshire, and events such as floods, fires, and storms throughout the region. He also worked for thirty years as staff photographer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Coolidge maintained a summer studio on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. His photograph of the Wreck of the Warren Sawyer was made on Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1885. He documented the Stony Brook Flood in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1886.

World Traveler

This teddy bear belonged to Susan Norton (1902-1989), who at the age of four, brought it along on a trip to Rome. This particular bear is a very early specimen (teddy bears were first manufactured in 1902). It is remarkable that is survives in such good conditions, especially considering its world travels.

The iconic Teddy Bear was so named after President Roosevelt, who refused to shoot a bear cub during a hunting party in 1902. The event was memorialized in a Washington Star cartoon that inspired Brooklyn store owner Morris Michtom to make a stuffed toy bear cub for a store window display. The bear’s popularity prompted Michtom to found the Ideal Toy Company, later one of the nation’s leading toy producers.

Adaptive Enterprise

This Navajo rug was purchased in 1906 by a visitor to Wyoming.

In the early twentieth century, Indigenous American goods became popular due to both an interest in handcrafts and, ironically, the subjugation of Indigenous American tribes.

Indigenous Americans, deprived of their land resources, created successful enterprises with craftwork, including rugmaking and basketry.

This rug is on view at Historic New England’s Castle Tucker in Wiscasset, Maine.