Book Signing with Dr. Joshua M. Smith

Saturday, March 18 at 2:00 pm. Book signing with Joshua Smith. With the help of Vice Admiral (ret.) of the U.S. Navy George W. Emery, we are thrilled to welcome Joshua Smith to the Louis T. Graves Memorial Public Library for a discussion and book signing of Making Maine: Statehood and the War of 1812 on Saturday, March 18 at 2:00 pm. Making Maine is an innovative history of the war, focusing on how it specifically affected what was then called the District of Maine. Drawing on archival materials from the United States, Britain, and Canada, Smith exposes the bitter experience of Maine’s citizens during that conflict as they endured multiple hardships, including starvation, burdensome taxation, smuggling, treason, and enemy occupation. War’s inherent miseries, along with a changing relationship between regional and national identities, gave rise to a statehood movement that rejected a Boston-centric worldview in favor of a broadly American identity.--Publishers Note. “Making Maine is a major contribution to the literature on the War of 1812, linking local and national history with scholarship on the Canadian and British experience. It will shape the historiography of the war going forward.”—Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812. “Based on impressive research, Smith provides a fascinating history of the bitter disputes that bedeviled the prosecution of the war in an area that shared a border with British territory but was politically subordinate to Massachusetts. Making Maine is a significant addition to regional accounts of the War of 1812.”—J. C. A. Stagg, author of The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent. Dr. Joshua M. Smith is currently the Director of the American Merchant Marine Museum he grew up in coastal Maine and on Cape Cod. He holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews, Maine Maritime Academy, East Carolina University, and the University of Maine. His other books include Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 (University Press of Florida), which won the John Lyman Award in American Maritime History in 2007, and Battle for the Bay: The Naval War of 1812. Copies of the book will be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be served. Saturday, March 18 doors open at 1:30 pm. The Library is located at 18 Maine Street, Kennebunkport, for further information, please call 967-2778 or visit our website at www.graveslibrary.org.