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by Andy O’Brien PHOTO: EMMC registered nurses announce their effort to form a union on July 11, 1975. One day Dottie Barron, a registered nurse at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, was called into her supervisor’s office. Her first… Read More »“We weren’t just fighting EMMC. We were fighting every hospital in the state of Maine.” — A History of Nurse Organizing in Maine

by Andy O’Brien PHOTO: A pre-Civil War newspaper cartoon promoting slavery. For several months between 1835 and 1837, a group of religiously devout abolitionist Mainers had a spirited debate by letters with a Presbyterian minister living in the South. The… Read More »The Northern Anti-Abolitionist Counterrevolution

by Andy O’Brien After a mob of white men dragged Noyes Academy — the first interracial, co-ed school in New England — off its foundation and left it in ruins in the middle of the road on a hot August… Read More »The Destruction of Noyes Academy: Aftermath

by Andy O’Brien On August 16, 1834, Maine abolitionists put out the call to anti-slavery activists across the state to come to Augusta on the third Wednesday of  October to “unite in fervent prayer to  Almighty God to direct and… Read More »Radical Mainers: The Founders of Maine’s Early Anti-Slavery Organizations

by Andy O’Brien General Samuel Fessenden became radicalized after meeting the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in the fall of 1832, in Portland. Garrison’s compelling words stoked an intense passion in the militia commander’s heart. He was more determined than… Read More »Radical Mainers: Abolitionist & Colonizationist Square Off for the the Great Portland Colonization Debate of 1833

by Andy O’Brien Late one evening in September, 1832, the rabble-rousing abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison disembarked from a ship in Portland Harbor. Garrison was fired up and ready to take on his bitter enemies, the American Colonization Society (ACS), which… Read More »Radical Mainers: William Lloyd Garrison’s Spirited Speaking Tour of Maine

by Andy O’Brien In Sept. 19, 1826, an extraordinary letter signed by six African American men appeared in Portland’s Eastern Argus newspaper. It was very unusual for local papers to print the opinions of Black Mainers, but what made this… Read More »Radical Mainers: The letter that Launched the Racial Justice Movement in Maine

by Andy O’Brien Think I heard my captain say Pay me my money down T’morrow is my sailin’ day Pay me my money down Wish’t I was Mr. Coffin’s son Pay me my money down Stay in the house an’… Read More »When Portland’s Waterfront Resounded with the Songs of Black Maritime Workers

by Andy O’Brien In 1819, just months after John Brown Russwurm entered Hebron Academy, his studies were cut short when a fire burned down the school’s main building. Historian Carl Patrick Burrowes has raised the question of whether it was… Read More »The Making of a Maine Abolitionist, Pan-Africanist & Pioneering Black Journalist, Part II