Work Relief In Maine

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

For 25 years, Franklin Roosevelt tried to build the world’s first tidal-electric power plant—by harnessing the Bay of Fundy’s giant tides. The enormous project would have dammed-up 110 square miles of coastal Maine and Canada. Moondoggle is a dramatic tale about the appeal of tidal power, the difficulties in realizing its potential, and the engineers and three U.S. Presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy) who tried to make clean and renewable tidal power a reality. Now on the 100th anniversary of the “Passamaquoddy Project’s” conception (1920-2020), Moondoggle—the only book on the project—explores what almost was, and what could be.

Celebrate the bicentennial of Maine statehood. Historian Tom Huntington covers the course of Maine’s often turbulent history, decade by decade. He writes about the death of Congressman Jonathan Cilley in a duel; the Portland Rum Riot and the birth of Prohibition; the Confederate raid on Portland Harbor; James G. Blaine’s scandal-ridden try for the presidency; the triumph and tragedy of Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American to play major league baseball; Sangerville native Hiram Maxim’s transformation of modern war; Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 visit to Maine (and the Portland resident who became the first person to stowaway on a transatlantic flight); the bloody shootout that killed gangster Al Brady in Bangor; the German saboteurs who came ashore on Mt. Desert Island during World War II; Margaret Chase Smith’s principled stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy; Samantha Smith’s plea for world peace; the arrival of Somali immigrants in Lewiston; and much, much more. It’s an entertaining and informative look at key events, milestones and personalities from two fascinating centuries of statehood.