Trudy Irene Scee

This is the first full history of the city of Bangor, and as such it deserves the respect due all trailbreakers.

The book's strengths include an effort to include a generous breadth of subject coverage (education, industry, public safety, health, institutions, personalities), a pleasant tone, and ample photographic depictions of Bangor over time.

The book's greatest strength is that it offers a "slice of life" of different time periods in Bangor, helping readers to understand the differing values (support for the poor, e.g.) and dangers (fire!) of bygone eras.

The book is a little more Euro-centric than was absolutely necessary. Early white residents of Kenduskeag Plantation / Bangor definitely communicated with Penobscot Indians as a political entity. The political history of the settlers/residents interactions with Wabanaki tribes is too large a subject to cover comprehensively within this book, but greater attention would have been valuable.

Greater description of Bangor's relationship with neighboring non-Wabanaki communities would have been helpful, too.

The decision to include history up to the present day might have been a misstep; it might've been preferable to leave off sometime around 1980 to provide some distance between author and subject.

The index is very poor; an authoritative index to institutional names and personal names mentioned even once in the book would have been worthwhile. No mention is made of race in the index, though Bangor's racial history is certainly discussed in the text itself. The index succeeds neither as an authoritative name index nor as a serious subject index, and this is a weakness for a work of this type.

I would also have appreciated greater use of maps to demonstrate changes in the shape and size of Bangor and/or greater Bangor over time.

The book is an excellent starting point for secondary school or undergraduate students who wish to learn about Bangor during a particular time period. It is also an excellent read if one simply wants to learn a bit more about Bangor's history. The book is less useful as a reference source.… (mehr)