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Seacoast History Blog
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LIVING WITH THE PAST Award-winning historian J. Dennis Robinson rambles on about local history in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and beyond. Timely, personal and behind-the-scenes commentary posted often. To reply to any of these topics or suggest new ones please use our
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form. For ALL archived blogs click HERE .
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast History Blog #84 February 27, 2010
I don’t know how I missed this one. Despite a lifetime off-and-on fascination with Nathaniel Hawthorne, I had no clue that his 1836 story “The Minister’s Black Veil” might be based on a real live minister from York, Maine. I’ve been tearing through the Internet for a couple of hours now pulling the story together. I even tried to download and re-read the classic Hawthorne story of the minister who wore a black cloth over his face to cover up his sins, but I fell asleep three times in the process. (Continued below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast History Blog #83 Feburary 19, 2010
Each time I revise that article on my UNH Prof Max Maynard my head starts to spin. When you show up at a guy’s house 3,000 miles from home on the day he almost dies, you gotta wonder. Was it fate or coincidence? Maybe the brain just spins more in winter in New England, but suddenly it seems like weird little connections are popping up all over. Like the other day, when I was reading a great biography of naval hero Stephen Decatur and a gentleman came up to me at an Athenaeum party. “I read what you wrote about my father in your last book!” he said, and I gulped. His nametag, amazingly, read “Stephen Decatur”. His father, whom I did write about, had the same name, and is descended from two similarly named Decaturs, heroes of the American Revolution and the War of 1812. (Continued below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #82 February 7, 2010
I wish I had more time for Kenneth Roberts. He not only managed to turn writing about history into a profitable career, but he did it right here where we live. And he did it time and time again, picking factual stories from the seacoast Maine and New Hampshire region and turning them into bestselling novels. He did it with "Indian fighter" Robert Rogers, and with Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear, and again with our Tory connection to Canada during the Revolution, and again with cannibalistic sailors on Boon Island just 12 miles off our shore. (Continued below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #81 January 26, 2010
Among the oddest of the movies by Louis de Rochemont is the animated version of George Orwell’s fable Animal Farm. That’s right, a Portsmouthm NH film producer made a totalitarian cartoon in which no one talks. It’s a fascinating story that involves E. Howard Hunt, the CIA and more. That story fills an entire book, but no time for all that here. Today we’re focused on a single footnote that is almost as strange. (Interview and photos below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #80 January 21, 2010
Every morning I get an email from Amazon.com telling me what top books their computer thinks I should buy. Imagine my surprise this morning to discover a book by an author I know. Rodman Philbrick of Kittery, Maine (and yes, a graduate of Portsmouth High School) is among five author’s honored this year by the American Library Association. Although he didn’t get the top prize (yet) Rod’s latest children’s book is among four others named a 2010 Newbery Honor Book. The Newbery Award has long been considered the “gold standard” and now that list includes The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg. (Continued below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #78 January 10, 2010
Every few years I seem to shed my digital skin and grow a new one. This is going to be one of those years. Learning curves can be time consuming and scary (I’m writing this in Word 97), but once the process starts, I find, you just have to hang on and ride it out. It’s like watching Avatar in 3D. At first you feel the SD glasses on your face. The special effects boggle your mind. You get a little headache, feel queasy, jump when sharp objects seem to poke out of the movie screen. But eventually, you’ve crossed over. You forget about the 3D glasses and settle back. Your brain has acclimated to the massive shift in information. The trick is knowing how far to move into the curve of the future, and how much of the past to cling to. (Continued below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #77 December 28, 2009
As an author with half a dozen projects developing I can’t wait to see how the ebook battles go in 2010. The Nook from Barnes & Noble finally arrived on Christmas Eve while the Kindle was the number one selling gift at Amazon.com. Publishers are freaking out over the increasing power of Kindle book buyers who are boycotting titles that cost more than $9.95. And for the first time in history, ebooks outsold paper books at Amazon on Christmas Day. (Continued below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #76 December 21, 2009
John Riley of Belchertown, MA recently wrote in search of details about the fire that swept their family cottage on Appledore Island at the Isles of Shoals in 1953. He sent along a snapshot. I didn’t know the story or the cottage. The grand Appledore Hotel and Celia Thaxter’s famous cottage burned in 1914 and get all the press. I searched the Athenaeum photo archive online and found a few pictures that matched John’s photo. Turns out that the wooden cottage was originally owned by Celia’s brother Cedric Laighton (also spelled "Leighton") and it survived the much publicized island blaze. So we dug a little deeper. (See full story below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #75 December 12, 2009
Amazon giveth and Amazon taketh away. The rise of the world’s biggest bookstore online has all but squashed the competing mom and pop bookstores. There were half a dozen in Portsmouth when I arrived thirty years ago and today there is one. Small stores just can’t compete on inventory with a home delivery service that carries every book ever written at slatshed discount prices. Then Amazon released the Kindle, a paper-like electronic reader that delivers books wirelessly in seconds even cheaper. Used books cost as little as one cent (plus $3.99 delivery) and thousands of e-books are free. But with each move Amazon makes to wipe out publishing as we once knew it, they create fresh new ways to discover and obtain books. (Continued below)
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Written by J. Dennis Robinson
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Seacoast Blog #74 December 5, 2009
I just got the word that my collection of banks shaped like strawberries is on display at – yes – Strawbery Banke Museum. It’s there during stroll in a wooden and glass case in the Tyco Center. I’ve been waiting two years for this momentous event. It is my first museum display. Sure, it’s ktischy junk, but that’s why I love it. There are about 30 items in the collection. All have a strawbrry theme, and all are coin banks. It is the world’s largest collection of strawberry banks, the result of two or three years of intense searching through the cobwebby basement of eBay. Now finally, you can bask in the glory of this magnificent obsession. (Continued below)
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| Thursday, February 09, 2012 |
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