Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Maine: Memories Making History (with Steve Bromage) | Episode 96

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Maine: Memories Making History (with Steve Bromage) | Episode 96 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Steve Bromage: Well, we're very fortunate that um one of one of the gem many gems in our collection is we have one of the twenty one of twenty six surviving copies of the Dunlap Broadside.
• 0:08
  Steve Bromage: And the Dunlap Broadside was the uh version, the first copy of the Declaration printed uh in Philadelphia on July 4th, 1776.
• 0:17
  Steve Bromage: And it was printed so that the word of independence could be spread to the colonies.
• 0:22
  Steve Bromage: So um the fact that we have one is pretty remarkable.
• 0:25
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:33
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:37
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:48
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:57
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 1:03
  Crista Cowan: When you think of Maine, you probably think about lighthouses.
• 1:08
  Crista Cowan: That's what I think about, or lobsta.
• 1:11
  Crista Cowan: I'm not even gonna pretend that I can do a Maine accent.
• 1:15
  Crista Cowan: But what you probably don't think about is the Declaration of Independence.
• 1:19
  Crista Cowan: But here we are, we're marching our way through the 50 states.
• 1:24
  Crista Cowan: We have come to the state of Maine, and Maine has a really interesting connection to the Declaration of Independence.
• 1:31
  Crista Cowan: Now, there's a little bit of history of Maine that you might not know.
• 1:35
  Crista Cowan: It was technically part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at the time of the Revolutionary War, and it went back and forth, parts of it between the US and Canada until it became a state in 1820.
• 1:52
  Crista Cowan: I love nerdy map-based history like that.
• 1:58
  Crista Cowan: How the borders were designed, who decided where borders got drawn.
• 2:04
  Crista Cowan: And so I geek out over stuff like that.
• 2:06
  Crista Cowan: Hopefully you find that interesting too, because it's really important when we're uncovering our family stories to understand how some of those border changes might have affected people.
• 2:16
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Steve Bromage.
• 2:18
  Crista Cowan: He is the executive director of the Maine Historical Society.
• 2:22
  Crista Cowan: And he and I nerd out a little bit over history and how place is so important in our family stories.
• 2:31
  Crista Cowan: And he'll share a little bit about why the Declaration of Independence has a really unique connection to the state of Maine.
• 2:39
  Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Steve Bromage.
• 2:42
  Crista Cowan: Well, uh, Steve, thank you so much for joining me.
• 2:46
  Crista Cowan: Uh, as you may have heard on the podcast, we are celebrating America 250 with an episode for each state.
• 2:53
  Crista Cowan: And you get to represent Maine as your background so beautifully illustrates.
• 2:58
  Crista Cowan: So I would love to hear a little bit about your connection to the state, where your main story starts.
• 3:04
  Steve Bromage: Sure.
• 3:05
  Steve Bromage: Uh well, it's a great question.
• 3:06
  Steve Bromage: I think in in so many ways, um, Maine is what has really made my family in my own experience.
• 3:12
  Steve Bromage: Um, my mom grew up in Pennsylvania, my dad threw out in New England, and and our my family roots are from across.
• 3:18
  Steve Bromage: But um, both of my parents' families started coming to Maine in the 1920s.
• 3:22
  Steve Bromage: Um so they both have uh history coming here.
• 3:25
  Steve Bromage: And then when they met in college in the 1950s, I think the thing that really connected them and helped them fall in love was the fact that they both had this love for Maine and this appreciation for Maine.
• 3:35
  Steve Bromage: So that really, I think started them and started our family.
• 3:39
  Steve Bromage: And in the 1950s, my grandparents, my dad's parents, bought a camp on a lake.
• 3:44
  Steve Bromage: Uh and um he, my dad and his grandfather and his father spent a couple about a year or two together, just driving back and forth, spending time at the camp, uh fixing it up, renovating it, drinking, having time together and doing all that good stuff.
• 4:00
  Steve Bromage: And I think that was very special to them.
• 4:02
  Steve Bromage: Um I was born in 1966.
• 4:04
  Steve Bromage: Um, my family, I I grew up in New Jersey.
• 4:07
  Steve Bromage: That's where my dad was for work um by then.
• 4:09
  Steve Bromage: And so my whole childhood was driving back and forth to that camp in Maine and working on it with my dad and my family and learning how to run an outboard and a boat and canoe.
• 4:19
  Steve Bromage: And so for me and our family, Maine was just always this special place of connection where we spent time together.
• 4:25
  Steve Bromage: Wonderful people, wonderful communities.
• 4:27
  Steve Bromage: So it's always felt like home.
• 4:29
  Steve Bromage: And so it's it's been in our bones that way.
• 4:32
  Steve Bromage: And then um, my wife and I moved here about 25 years ago when I had this opportunity at Maine Historical.
• 4:38
  Steve Bromage: We had always wanted to get here, and I felt we felt really lucky uh to be here.
• 4:43
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 4:43
  Crista Cowan: How far of a drive was that from where you lived in New Jersey up to the camp?
• 4:48
  Steve Bromage: That's a great question because it was about six hours, and so much of my childhood was defined by the landmarks between here and there.
• 4:54
  Steve Bromage: And I know we're gonna talk about how you got it into the field and stuff, but driving by um, you know, Sturbridge Village and the stories of who did what to whom, which child got left at what rest area, who threw what out the window, you know, not crossing the center line of the back seat.
• 5:10
  Steve Bromage: So, you know, everything about getting to Maine was very formative.
• 5:14
  Crista Cowan: Part of part of the whole experience, right?
• 5:16
  Steve Bromage: Yeah.
• 5:16
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 5:17
  Crista Cowan: How many siblings were there?
• 5:18
  Steve Bromage: Just one, my sister and I.
• 5:20
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 5:21
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 5:21
  Crista Cowan: Well, there you go.
• 5:22
  Crista Cowan: Well, um as you were growing up, like you have this family connection to Maine, but did you have any sense growing up about the deep historical connection, like just what, you know, what Maine really represents and what was happening in that state, or was history not on your radar as a kid?
• 5:40
  Steve Bromage: Well, you know, I think it's an interesting question too.
• 5:43
  Steve Bromage: And um, I don't think I thought about, you know, I think so much of about Maine, and when you think about Maine, it comes down to a very, very special sense of place.
• 5:51
  Steve Bromage: Um, Maine is a place that I think people feel very deeply in their hearts, whether they've been here for generations or they visited it from away.
• 5:58
  Steve Bromage: A lot of people come back every summer or or visit it.
• 6:01
  Steve Bromage: And I think to everybody, you know, there's just a great sense of pride.
• 6:04
  Steve Bromage: And so the, you know, the question is what makes that sense of place?
• 6:07
  Steve Bromage: And for a lot of people, it might be the landscape, the environment.
• 6:10
  Steve Bromage: But um certainly uh in my adult life and through my work here, I think so much of what makes Maine special is its history and um its communities and its people and the way people have lived generation after generation.
• 6:22
  Steve Bromage: So I think I very much felt that special sense of place when I was little.
• 6:27
  Steve Bromage: And it wasn't until later um and through my work here where I really came to recognize that that that history, that sense of place is is because of it's our personal stories.
• 6:36
  Steve Bromage: So people don't think about history and the big events that happen so much as they think about what I was describing before, generation after generation.
• 6:44
  Steve Bromage: My parents, four generations of people living and working in a paper mill, and all the ways of life that came after that, the places they've hunted or snowmobiled, or whatever people's passion are in those places.
• 6:56
  Steve Bromage: So to me, that really has emerged as what's history and hence hence Maine's special sense of place, the the the generational community experiences and family experiences that make us feel attached to places.
• 7:09
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's so well said.
• 7:10
  Crista Cowan: You know, I I grew up in the West, and um, when I first I moved to Utah right after college, uh, and I'm a fifth generation Los Angelino on my dad's side, and we've lived up and down the West Coast, but my grandmother's parents were born in Utah.
• 7:27
  Crista Cowan: And I still remember the first night after I'd, you know, unpacked all the boxes and we're still sleeping on the mattress on the floor in the place we moved into.
• 7:35
  Crista Cowan: The next morning I walked out onto the balcony of our condo and I looked at Mount Tempanogas and I just burst into tears.
• 7:41
  Crista Cowan: And part of it was that connection to this place when I realized my great-grandmother looked at this mountain every day of her life.
• 7:49
  Crista Cowan: And and that that matters, I think, to people.
• 7:53
  Crista Cowan: And I don't understand why we have such emotional and visceral reactions to it, but I've experienced it more than once in my life.
• 7:59
  Crista Cowan: And so, yeah, place matters, absolutely.
• 8:02
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, and that's so powerful.
• 8:03
  Steve Bromage: And certainly Maine, you know, in Maine, there's this whole concept of, you know, being from away or being from here.
• 8:08
  Steve Bromage: I think people really feel pride and want to be connected.
• 8:12
  Steve Bromage: And so finding those personal connections where I'm legit, I'm here, you know.
• 8:15
  Steve Bromage: So I think again, a lot of our work in Maine Historical is finding the fact that everybody who's connected here is a contributor to what makes Maine Maine and their stories are critical to it.
• 8:24
  Steve Bromage: And we all kind of are fit and are connected to it.
• 8:27
  Steve Bromage: But that's personal sense of connection is really powerful.
• 8:30
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, absolutely.
• 8:31
  Crista Cowan: Well, you walked us a little bit through your childhood connection to Maine.
• 8:34
  Crista Cowan: You got there uh through your career ultimately.
• 8:37
  Crista Cowan: So walk us through, you know, what the genesis is of your career in history.
• 8:42
  Steve Bromage: Oh, yeah, that's a good question.
• 8:43
  Steve Bromage: Um, so my family, as I say, most of it was everything has been New England, New England, New England, and uh and time in Maine and throughout.
• 8:50
  Steve Bromage: And so when I think I was looking for college, I just said, Oh, I'll go someplace different, I'll try something different.
• 8:54
  Steve Bromage: So I ended up at University of Richmond, which was a good experience.
• 8:57
  Steve Bromage: Um, but then for my career, I really wanted to, you know, as idealistic, I wanted to do something that I thought mattered.
• 9:04
  Steve Bromage: So I worked in publishing for the first five or so years for a literary agent.
• 9:07
  Steve Bromage: And we did a lot of nonfiction work.
• 9:09
  Steve Bromage: Um, and I found what my real passion was was Americana.
• 9:13
  Steve Bromage: You know, I traveled around the country, the West, and everything.
• 9:15
  Steve Bromage: I love, you know, I just continue to be obsessed about what makes this country so unique and special and all the different regions and parts of it.
• 9:23
  Steve Bromage: So um after working in publishing, I was very interested in documentary work, and I thought um uh the American history degree in graduate school would be a really good way to ground that, uh, those interests in documentary work.
• 9:36
  Steve Bromage: So I went to UMass Amherst for my graduate school.
• 9:39
  Steve Bromage: I had the great opportunity to work for a wonderful little documentary company uh that did a lot of work in disability history.
• 9:46
  Steve Bromage: Uh we did a big four-part um history of disability for National Public Radio around 1995 that was really very innovative in um looking across disabilities, looking across geography and institutions and finding common themes and looking back how contemporary attitudes about disability and policies were shaped by generations of religion, social policies, et cetera.
• 10:12
  Steve Bromage: And as part of that, we also created, you know, this is 1995, 96, so the early days of the internet, an online website to go with it that pulled together the primary documents from around the country that it was based on.
• 10:25
  Steve Bromage: So uh pretty early in in that part of my career, I had done some pretty innovative web stuff in some interesting history field.
• 10:34
  Steve Bromage: I'd done education, I done fundraising related to it.
• 10:36
  Steve Bromage: So that was kind of the background and my experience I had when my wife and I were again determined to get to Maine, and I started uh looking and I reached out to Maine Historical Society, and just um the timing was very serendipitous, and it just happened to be a great opportunity in the life of the organization and where I was and what I wanted to do.
• 10:55
  Crista Cowan: That's incredible.
• 10:56
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 10:57
  Crista Cowan: You say the documents, the primary documents, and my genealogist heart just lights up.
• 11:02
  Steve Bromage: Well, my my staff will appreciate that I lead with documents too.
• 11:05
  Steve Bromage: I don't always, you know.
• 11:07
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, I get that.
• 11:08
  Crista Cowan: Well, um, so tell us about Maine Historical and your role there and kind of its role in the community and in the state.
• 11:16
  Steve Bromage: Sure.
• 11:16
  Steve Bromage: Well, it's been it's been uh just a fascinating and wonderful uh experience and place to spend my life and to lean into.
• 11:24
  Steve Bromage: So I arrived here in in in 2001 and I started as a part-time grant writer.
• 11:29
  Steve Bromage: You know, that was the opportunity, that was the foot in the door.
• 11:31
  Steve Bromage: And uh, you know, as anybody who raises money and thinks so that's also a great opportunity because you could see what what the opportunities were in the organization, what it was trying to do, and really make a case for things.
• 11:41
  Steve Bromage: So I arrived just as we were starting something called the Maine Memory Network, which is our online digital museum.
• 11:48
  Steve Bromage: And that that had just a really interesting concept from which everything has grown.
• 11:53
  Steve Bromage: And when we were when Maine Historical was starting to look at how do we share our collections, it became apparent that we could create a website or a database that would let any organization around Maine scan material locally and upload it into this centralized database.
• 12:08
  Steve Bromage: So it's kind of a distributed input model.
• 12:10
  Steve Bromage: And so we we built that, um, you know, with saying, yeah, that's that seems sound good.
• 12:16
  Steve Bromage: And then um through a whole series of major federal grants over the next 10, 14 years, we continue to be able to develop and flesh it out.
• 12:25
  Steve Bromage: But it's got a very, very simple model.
• 12:27
  Steve Bromage: Um, you know, again, um MHS provides the infrastructure, the training and support, or this is how it got started.
• 12:33
  Steve Bromage: And then we put the call out and we would go out and travel around the state saying, hey, we have this opportunity, we have this platform.
• 12:40
  Steve Bromage: Um, you know, and if you think about so much of this country in Maine, there are, you know, there are hundreds of small historical societies in local communities that had these wonderful collections, but most of them are run by elderly volunteers, they're only open seasonally, they don't have the resources or the capacity, and oftentimes they're kind of invisible even in their own community.
• 13:00
  Steve Bromage: So there we were.
• 13:02
  Steve Bromage: So we had this platform and this ability to go out and say, hey, we'll help you share your stories.
• 13:06
  Steve Bromage: Um, but we also did it in a way that would let them pick which material that they were gonna scan and upload.
• 13:12
  Steve Bromage: What were what were the stories important to them?
• 13:15
  Steve Bromage: So the first um the first wave of Maine memory was really it's about creating a new kind of digital archive that collapsed physical, that uh collapsed institutional boundaries and geographic boundaries.
• 13:29
  Steve Bromage: So all of a sudden, you know, Maine for East Coast is a vast, vast state, um, very spread out.
• 13:35
  Steve Bromage: Um, and we have these hundreds of organs uh cultural organizations.
• 13:38
  Steve Bromage: So once you started putting this material online from dozens of organizations, say it's the Civil War, or pick your topic of choice, all of a sudden you could look across collections, across community, and you could see the commonalities, you could see what distinguished different places.
• 13:54
  Steve Bromage: So that was a really um uh powerful first phase, digital archive.
• 13:59
  Steve Bromage: Pretty soon you could see, oh, this is awesome, this is amazing.
• 14:02
  Steve Bromage: Um, but what are the stories?
• 14:04
  Steve Bromage: How do you tell, you know, how do you tell the stories and pull those uh individual items together into something that's more interpretive or meaningful?
• 14:11
  Steve Bromage: So then our next big grant was um from NEH to turn it into an online uh an online museum where we hired a curator and you we really focused on um converting physical exhibits to digital space, creating new digital exhibits based on where people what people were interested in.
• 14:29
  Steve Bromage: So that was great and fascinating.
• 14:31
  Steve Bromage: Then the next phase we said, wait a second, this is wonderful, but people want to know about Maine and how Maine's history.
• 14:37
  Steve Bromage: So we got an uh an NEH grant and we could create something called Maine History Online.
• 14:42
  Steve Bromage: Um, and that basically tried to tell the story of Maine, but in a really interesting way.
• 14:48
  Steve Bromage: So it's uh divided by chronology and theme, but it it so it talks big picture about what's going on in Maine.
• 14:56
  Steve Bromage: It puts Maine in the national context of what was going on nationally, but then it really tells the story to the community's experiences.
• 15:02
  Steve Bromage: So all of those contributors around Maine, you get this intimate story as you're talking about industrialization about the textile mills or the shoe mills or the Franco workers that are here.
• 15:13
  Steve Bromage: And so you could really connect the American story to the most local community in a really integrated way that was very special.
• 15:22
  Crista Cowan: That's so incredible.
• 15:23
  Crista Cowan: And as you think about that, like what I'm hearing you say as a genealogist is if I have family from Maine, I could spend hours and hours and hours on your website.
• 15:33
  Steve Bromage: Absolutely.
• 15:34
  Steve Bromage: And the sense of discovery, you know, uh of people finding because it does so focus on the individual and the personal experience, um, that that is absolutely um, I think where so much of the power can comes in.
• 15:47
  Steve Bromage: And I think that individual participation and community participation has been key to main uh Maine Memories Mojo.
• 15:54
  Steve Bromage: So that the those first phases I described were kind of about institutional development.
• 15:59
  Steve Bromage: And so at this point, I should say we have 300 contributing partners around Maine, organizations that are sharing collections through there.
• 16:07
  Steve Bromage: So the the reach is really pretty powerful.
• 16:10
  Steve Bromage: So the next phase, you know, I mean, it it just like was one discovery after another.
• 16:16
  Steve Bromage: Um so the next phase was uh we launched Maine Memory launched in 2001, and Maine um created a very innovative middle school laptop program in that same year.
• 16:27
  Steve Bromage: So 2001, um, Maine's Maine's governor Angus King committed to giving every middle school kid a laptop, regardless of their geography.
• 16:36
  Steve Bromage: So the most rural kids in the in the most disadvantaged communities, all those kids had a laptop.
• 16:41
  Steve Bromage: Same year, Maine Memory came out with that principle that we want everybody's story to capture.
• 16:46
  Steve Bromage: So all of a sudden you had this infrastructure and commitment and to where communities were actually had the tools to do this.
• 16:53
  Steve Bromage: So we started working with uh local partnerships between local schools and historical societies.
• 16:59
  Steve Bromage: And the kids, the folks from the historical society would bring the documents to the school once a week and they would scan the documents.
• 17:06
  Steve Bromage: You know, they provided the technology technological muscle and knowledge, but the community members were talking about what was in the photographs and they were talking about the history.
• 17:16
  Steve Bromage: Um, so it became this really you could see this power when you brought people together.
• 17:21
  Steve Bromage: The kids say, I just live in this meh town, but all of a sudden they started looking at these pictures of the grand hotel and they started doing research.
• 17:29
  Steve Bromage: Um, you know, one of the very special communities in our heart was Scowhegan, where the kids over the course of a year got very actively involved and they're researching, creating online exhibits, they're making presentations to the town, they're developing skills, the town, the community was learning to collaborate.
• 17:46
  Steve Bromage: So this really powerful thing could come out of this history participation.
• 17:51
  Steve Bromage: It was really pretty cool.
• 17:53
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, right.
• 17:53
  Crista Cowan: So many people hear the word history and they think dead old and boring.
• 17:57
  Crista Cowan: And yet what you've created in Maine is something so living and vibrant and interconnected and relevant.
• 18:03
  Crista Cowan: I love it.
• 18:04
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 18:06
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, you know, it's funny.
• 18:08
  Steve Bromage: So and it just it builds on to your point, it just builds on it, builds on itself.
• 18:12
  Steve Bromage: So that those experiences in those community led to we had four IMLS national leadership grants in a row to continue to develop concepts that were emerging from Maine Memory.
• 18:22
  Steve Bromage: And if ever there's a time to give a shout out to the importance of the NEH funding and the IMLS funding, Maine Historical Society wouldn't be what it is today.
• 18:31
  Steve Bromage: Um, the tools and the the resources we provide to Maine wouldn't be what they were.
• 18:35
  Steve Bromage: Maine memory wouldn't exist as it is today without those investments.
• 18:39
  Steve Bromage: I think we probably had between six and seven million dollars in federal grants over about a 15-year period.
• 18:44
  Steve Bromage: But it was like the investment bank that let us think creatively and innovate and try things.
• 18:50
  Steve Bromage: So that can experience in that town Scowhegan led to something called uh something we did called the Maine Community Heritage Project.
• 18:57
  Steve Bromage: And we developed a year-long model where we would mentor communities, and each community would put together a team that included a historical society, library, and school, and we would mentor them as they came together.
• 19:09
  Steve Bromage: You know, they those organizations have such uh mutual interests, but there's a lot of boundaries to collaborating, you know, in terms of schedules and and and all there.
• 19:19
  Steve Bromage: So we mentored them as they learned to collaborate, but they started by talking about what are our important stories?
• 19:24
  Steve Bromage: Um, what do we have to share?
• 19:26
  Steve Bromage: And then they kind of came a work, developed work plans and built websites within memory network about their town's history.
• 19:34
  Steve Bromage: So again, it was just a history website to start with, but by thinking differently about how stories and people and communities come together to recognize what's important to them and their sense of place, you know, just the the opportunities and the connections just keep like happening and happening.
• 19:53
  Steve Bromage: So pretty powerful.
• 19:56
  Crista Cowan: How does main historical kind of you know?
• 19:59
  Crista Cowan: The remit sounds in some ways a little bit similar to like a state archive.
• 20:03
  Crista Cowan: How do you guys interface with the state archive?
• 20:06
  Crista Cowan: What, you know, what boundaries do you have to draw between what documentary history they preserve versus what you preserve?
• 20:11
  Crista Cowan: What does that look like in Maine?
• 20:13
  Steve Bromage: Sure, it's a great question.
• 20:14
  Steve Bromage: And as you probably have encountered, one of the interesting things about historical societies and archives is the model and the governance model is different in every part of the country and every different region.
• 20:24
  Steve Bromage: So in New England, uh, most of the historical societies, I think all the historical societies are private nonprofits.
• 20:30
  Steve Bromage: So we're a private nonprofit.
• 20:32
  Steve Bromage: Um again, I think I said founded in 1822.
• 20:35
  Steve Bromage: Um, and so we we have our own mission.
• 20:38
  Steve Bromage: We get a very tiny, tiny amount of money from the state, but most of the money we have to raise ourselves.
• 20:43
  Steve Bromage: Um so we collaborate very closely with the state archives, um, the state museum, the state library, and the other state cultural organizations.
• 20:52
  Steve Bromage: But I think we really do have pretty unique um missions.
• 20:56
  Steve Bromage: The state museum is more object-heavy in its collections, where we're more archival-based in our strengths.
• 21:02
  Steve Bromage: Um the state archives is really about the the records of government um more than the broader historical collections.
• 21:10
  Steve Bromage: So I think we all kind of have our lanes and collaborate pretty well and and and talk and we do collaborate quite a bit.
• 21:17
  Crista Cowan: So if people are interested, if they discover they've got ancestors who lived in Maine, um, most of us as genealogists, the state archive is going to be one of our first stops.
• 21:27
  Crista Cowan: But what I'm hearing you say is that, you know, in Maine in particular, and in maybe some other New England states, that that's gonna be more government-based records as opposed to more of the local and cultural history that the historical society is collecting.
• 21:40
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, yeah, um the state archives absolutely has the vital records and that's such, but we have uh copies of that and lots and lots of other resources and local records.
• 21:49
  Steve Bromage: And to your point, you know, business records and journals and diaries and connections.
• 21:53
  Steve Bromage: And I think one of the real strengths of the organization that we build here is the research staff and the team.
• 22:00
  Steve Bromage: Like they are so smart and capable in terms of helping facilitate people's research.
• 22:06
  Steve Bromage: So the amount of positive feedback I get in here on my staff, somebody's coming in with whatever that question is, and the ability to say, well, here we might have X, Y, and Z.
• 22:17
  Steve Bromage: Let's take a look.
• 22:18
  Steve Bromage: But you also should look at here, there, and the other place.
• 22:21
  Steve Bromage: So I think, you know, the as you know, in genealogy, the facilitation of the research is so important.
• 22:27
  Steve Bromage: And um and I think that's one of the places MHS really excels.
• 22:32
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 22:32
  Crista Cowan: So now I'm excited to see peek in my family tree and see if I've got anybody from Maine, because who knew you had so many incredible resources.
• 22:41
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 22:42
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and you've really, it sounded like it sounds like made um like history come alive for a lot of people and made it something that is interactive and something you do as opposed to just something you look at or an exhibit you walk through, right?
• 22:59
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, well, and I think that's so fundamental.
• 23:01
  Steve Bromage: So my you know, first 12 or 13 years here was really focused on the development of main memory and all of the things that it could become, some of the things we were talking about.
• 23:10
  Steve Bromage: Then when I took over as director, I guess about 13 or 14 years ago, you could see all this potential and we were doing great things, but we really needed to build the organization.
• 23:19
  Steve Bromage: You know, we were small and lean, and we really needed to pull it together in terms of to your earlier question about what's our mission.
• 23:27
  Steve Bromage: So we saw all this kind of opportunity.
• 23:30
  Steve Bromage: I saw this opportunity, so many of those principles that lived in Maine Memory Network about participation and pulling all these different stories from across Maine together was something that I we saw we could do in our physical space and in all aspects of our program.
• 23:46
  Steve Bromage: So that really, when I took over as director, we really started building out the team and trying to think about, you know, what does a forward-looking curator do?
• 23:53
  Steve Bromage: What does a forward-looking um collections people do?
• 23:56
  Steve Bromage: And how do we collaborate across the organization?
• 23:59
  Steve Bromage: So I started the process and we put together this incredible um management team.
• 24:04
  Steve Bromage: But one of the one of the key next things we did after Maine Memory or building on Maine Memory was thinking about our exhibit program and being responsive, you know, and thinking we've we sit, we had this responsibility.
• 24:15
  Steve Bromage: We sit on this incredible archive and knowledge about what makes Maine Maine across every topic, you know, the economy, ways of life, the people of the state, and that's our collection, but that's also all of those partners around the state.
• 24:27
  Steve Bromage: So we started thinking about for our exhibit program, okay, what's going on in Maine and how can we provide context and information and perspective for what people are interested in talking about?
• 24:39
  Steve Bromage: So, you know, I think going back to around 2017, we did a major immigration show.
• 24:44
  Steve Bromage: In 2018, we did a big show on Maine's food economy and culture, which are really important here.
• 24:49
  Steve Bromage: We did a show on changes in the paper industry, another really critical topic.
• 24:54
  Steve Bromage: Going into Maine's bicentennial, which was 2020 when Maine, Maine was 200 years old, we said it's kind of hard to think about or understand 200 years of statehood without understanding 13,000 years of Wabanaki history.
• 25:07
  Steve Bromage: So we worked very closely with the Wabanaki community.
• 25:11
  Steve Bromage: Um, and that exhibit the exhibit we did in 2019, Holding Up the Sky, had uh eight Wabanaki uh curators, co-cl uh collaborators who really helped and who really shaped that exhibit.
• 25:22
  Steve Bromage: And so I think over that time, and I think um while we were doing that work, we really kind of cut our teeth and and really I think developed a voice where we're both kind of fearless and taking on challenging things in in history, in Maine's history, but also doing it in a way that is leaves people intrigued, wanting to learn more and not torn down by the history, but empowered to think about w where we are today and who do we want to be today and where do we go from today.
• 25:52
  Steve Bromage: So so anyway, um that was really important in thinking about how people understand history uh and starting to think about just reaching beyond history lovers to everybody who cares about Maine and recognizing that these stories, this knowledge, this perspective can be a really powerful full force in our culture.
• 26:11
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, oh I love it.
• 26:13
  Crista Cowan: I love everything about it.
• 26:14
  Crista Cowan: It's so interesting because I've always loved history, um, but I've always looked at it through the lens of family history, um, those individual stories of migration, of place, of community.
• 26:26
  Crista Cowan: Um, and I think sometimes as new people come into family history, you know, they take an ancestry DNA test or they start a family tree or they inherit a box of grandma's photos when she's cleaning out her house.
• 26:37
  Crista Cowan: Like there's that little spark of an interest.
• 26:40
  Crista Cowan: And I think sometimes they get so focused on building the family tree that they forget to look at some of that larger contextual history.
• 26:48
  Crista Cowan: So the model that you've developed at a state level certainly can apply even at a family level if people look at the work that you guys have done and the way that you've done it, um, and can be used as a resource to help individual family historians make their family stories richer and more interesting and really more complete.
• 27:10
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, I think absolutely.
• 27:11
  Steve Bromage: I think it's all about a sense of connection and how we connect, connect as human beings, as members of a community and that power.
• 27:18
  Steve Bromage: And it does start with understanding and appreciating, taking pride in who we are.
• 27:22
  Steve Bromage: And I think, you know, you know, for all the issues we have in our culture today, you know, a a part of it is we forget how much we're all driven by the same things as human beings.
• 27:32
  Steve Bromage: You know, each of us is looking for security, opportunity, a place to raise a family, to care for our parents, um, to dig in and to be part of a community.
• 27:41
  Steve Bromage: And that's something we all share.
• 27:43
  Steve Bromage: Um, and so I think, you know, it's funny, our so our mission statement is to preserve and share main story.
• 27:49
  Steve Bromage: I often like to add on wherever and however that happens.
• 27:54
  Steve Bromage: So, you know, in the old days at a at a historical society, it's really or a museum, it's about your collections and what you collect and what makes it here or not.
• 28:02
  Steve Bromage: And if it's not in your collection, you care less about it.
• 28:05
  Steve Bromage: Whereas I think one of the powers of Maine Memory Network is seeing how connect all of this stuff is connected, all these stories are connected.
• 28:13
  Steve Bromage: And to really have a view of the world, you want to to see it all together.
• 28:17
  Steve Bromage: So that's what's in our collections, what's at other state organizations, it's what's in local historical societies and libraries, but it's also what's in your attic.
• 28:25
  Steve Bromage: So, seeing, I think to your point about genealogy, seeing the ways that we can support people, how do I take care of what's in my attic?
• 28:33
  Steve Bromage: How do I understand what it is?
• 28:35
  Steve Bromage: How do how do I understand what it is and what its significance is?
• 28:38
  Steve Bromage: And oh my God, my my family was important to this community because we got here 13,000 years ago or five generations ago, or last week because there's a new something opening.
• 28:51
  Steve Bromage: So I think our ability, I think to your point about relevancy of history, it starts with this sense that each of our stories matters, each of us is contributors, we're all stewards of this place.
• 29:03
  Steve Bromage: And so our ability to create an environment, a way of thinking about Maine and history that sees the values in all of it, and what it really comes down to is you can understand Maine and what it makes it such a special place.
• 29:16
  Steve Bromage: If you leave out any community, any region, any story, from the summer people to the factory work, it's all fundamental to this place.
• 29:25
  Steve Bromage: So honoring those stories and celebrating them and bringing them together to me transforms history's role and gives it the opportunity to be a really fundamental, key part of contemporary life.
• 29:39
  Crista Cowan: The fact that your job gives you the opportunity to travel around the state, to see those different communities, to look those people in the eye and hear their stories.
• 29:47
  Crista Cowan: I think that's one of the things I feel so passionately about is hearing people's stories and really seeing them for who they are and and uncovering the stories of the past that made us who we are.
• 29:58
  Crista Cowan: I think that's such a such a gift to be able to do that as a career.
• 30:03
  Crista Cowan: And that's certainly what one of the things I love about my own job.
• 30:07
  Steve Bromage: Yeah.
• 30:07
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, it's neat.
• 30:08
  Steve Bromage: And you know, so all of that, all this institutional development over really 20 plus years now, it in some ways it feels like MHS is finally becoming the place that you imagined it could be and and growing.
• 30:19
  Steve Bromage: And so um eventually, and in a couple of years, we really do need a new museum building and facility.
• 30:24
  Steve Bromage: But I I think there continues to be this opportunity to think very differently and creatively about history.
• 30:30
  Steve Bromage: So that creating a museum that really is not, again, the Taj Mahal to our organization, but a place where stories and partners and communities around the state are represented and their objects and their items and their stories are the featured story, uh, the featured characteristic.
• 30:47
  Steve Bromage: So you come here to really get oriented to what makes Maine Maine, and it's a place where Mayners can really come and explore and celebrate.
• 30:55
  Steve Bromage: Um, so I just think so much opportunity.
• 30:57
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, for sure.
• 30:58
  Crista Cowan: Well, in 2026, we're celebrating America 250, which, you know, a lot of people talk about the 250th anniversary of our country.
• 31:06
  Crista Cowan: Really, it's the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence.
• 31:11
  Crista Cowan: It took us a few years to to win that independence.
• 31:14
  Crista Cowan: But uh Maine has a unique connection to the Declaration of Independence.
• 31:20
  Steve Bromage: Yeah.
• 31:20
  Steve Bromage: Well, we're very fortunate that um one of one of the gem, many gems in our collection is we have one of the 20s, one of 26 surviving copies of the Dunlap Broadside.
• 31:29
  Steve Bromage: And the Dunlap Broadside was the uh version, the first copy of the Declaration printed uh in Philadelphia on July 4th, 1776.
• 31:37
  Steve Bromage: And it was printed so that the word of independence could be spread to the colonies.
• 31:42
  Steve Bromage: So um the fact that we have one is pretty remarkable, and it's pretty interesting how it came to be in our collections, too.
• 31:49
  Steve Bromage: So we've got this incredible fog, it's called the Fog Autograph Collection, about 5,000 autographs that were collected by a doctor in Elliott, Maine in the late 19 in the late 19th century.
• 32:02
  Steve Bromage: Um when he died, so he, you know, uh autograph collection was a thing of that period, and he had set out to do a create a comprehensive collection of all the signers of the Declaration, all the members of the Continental Congress, the generals in the Continental Army, and on and on and on.
• 32:19
  Steve Bromage: Um, and so amongst in and with that collection, so he died in I think eight 1896.
• 32:25
  Steve Bromage: The collection came to MHS uh soon thereafter.
• 32:28
  Steve Bromage: Within that was this copy of the Declaration of Independence.
• 32:31
  Steve Bromage: So, you know, it's funny, in you know, in various cataloging records from the 19 teens, there's reference to the Declaration of Independence, but I'm not sure we fully recognized what we had here.
• 32:42
  Steve Bromage: Um, and then um, you know, I think after the bicentennial, there was more and more interest in identifying and authenticating uh copies of the Declaration.
• 32:51
  Steve Bromage: So it was at that point we were processing that collection, and people, yeah, the organization came to the realized realization that we might really have something here.
• 32:59
  Steve Bromage: So it wasn't authenticated until 1991, but there it is, and now it's a it's a gem of a collection.
• 33:05
  Crista Cowan: Wow, that's amazing.
• 33:06
  Crista Cowan: And you have plans for it for the for the 250 celebration?
• 33:11
  Steve Bromage: We do.
• 33:12
  Steve Bromage: Uh, and this is really all coming together fast and furious, but I think really, really special.
• 33:16
  Steve Bromage: So I think, you know, again, in this national moment, everybody's trying to figure out how quite to do the 250th and and to set the right tona.
• 33:23
  Steve Bromage: And I should step back and say that, you know, I'm a bicentennial kid.
• 33:27
  Steve Bromage: I was 10 in 1976, and all of that bicentennial stuff made a huge impression.
• 33:33
  Steve Bromage: I was with my family in Philadelphia for the bicentennial parade.
• 33:36
  Steve Bromage: My dad collected and rode high-wheel bicycles, and he was in the parade.
• 33:41
  Steve Bromage: And so there we were as little Steve, you know, watching and beholding all of that.
• 33:44
  Steve Bromage: So that's my context for feeling like we need to do the 250th big time.
• 33:49
  Steve Bromage: Um, so anyway, so Maine Historical Society, with this organization we built, had said, you know, how do we really lean in and how do we provide civic leadership for this important moment?
• 33:58
  Steve Bromage: And how do we try to set a different tone in the set of civic dialogue?
• 34:01
  Steve Bromage: So we had we're gonna do our traditional things.
• 34:04
  Steve Bromage: We're gonna have a major exhibition here at Maine Historical that really explores Maine's role in the revolution.
• 34:09
  Steve Bromage: We've got great digital content we're putting out, but we've always had this copy of the declaration, which we knew was going to be in the exhibit.
• 34:18
  Steve Bromage: But then we this past summer we started saying, you know, I had a friend who invited me to give a talk up in the town of Camden.
• 34:24
  Steve Bromage: She said, Can you bring that declaration with you?
• 34:27
  Steve Bromage: And I was like, uh, you know, I I always have my ongoing conversation with our collections people and my deputy director, Jamie, about I know what the answer is to that.
• 34:36
  Steve Bromage: And uh and and they're so awesome in taking care of the collections.
• 34:39
  Steve Bromage: But Jamie and I started talking and said, you know, what would it take to do it rather than not do it?
• 34:45
  Steve Bromage: And so we started to think through it and put a plan together.
• 34:48
  Steve Bromage: And so we said, you know, for the 2026, it would be really cool to do a statewide tour of the declaration.
• 34:53
  Steve Bromage: What would that take?
• 34:54
  Steve Bromage: And then as we were doing that, we said, well, what does statewide mean?
• 34:58
  Steve Bromage: Is that four stops?
• 34:59
  Steve Bromage: But we we started to think, you know, in Maine, the 16 counties is a really important aspect of Maine's identity and its reality.
• 35:07
  Steve Bromage: You know, we have 16 counties that all contribute in different ways.
• 35:11
  Steve Bromage: And so we really said to ourselves, if we're going to do this, we need to go to each of Maine's 16 counties.
• 35:17
  Steve Bromage: So we um we came up with a plan, you know, so much of it is about insurance and security and the process of doing it, but we came up with this commitment to take the declaration so that every Mainer has the opportunity to be in close to and encounter the sacred national document and to be part of this 250th and to celebrate Maine's role and their community's role in this moment.
• 35:40
  Steve Bromage: So that's what we're doing.
• 35:41
  Steve Bromage: Um the tour will kick off here on the on the 4th of July um 2026, the 250th at Maine Historical Society.
• 35:50
  Steve Bromage: Um, and then two weeks later it'll start traveling around the country.
• 35:53
  Steve Bromage: It'll be on display for um two days um in each in each county uh and it'll move around and around.
• 36:01
  Steve Bromage: Um it we are setting it up to to, we're in the process of selecting um host sites now, and we're we're having wonderful collections with partners around uh conversations with partners around the state.
• 36:12
  Steve Bromage: Um each community will have a commemorative event of some sort so that they can play, they can participate in the 250 in a ceremonial way.
• 36:20
  Steve Bromage: So we're just really excited to uh again reset the kind of the tone to to celebrate Maine's role in this country, what Mainers contribute, and have everybody participate in it.
• 36:31
  Crista Cowan: That is unbelievable.
• 36:32
  Crista Cowan: I have done a lot of research into what many of the states are doing for America 250.
• 36:38
  Crista Cowan: And that may be one of the most intentional and touching, I think, tributes to our country and to that document.
• 36:46
  Crista Cowan: Um, but I also know how much work goes into something like that.
• 36:49
  Crista Cowan: So well, well done, Maine.
• 36:51
  Crista Cowan: And all of you.
• 36:54
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, well, thanks.
• 36:54
  Steve Bromage: And you just the response from the corporate leadership and the civic leadership, you know, New Balance is supporting us.
• 37:00
  Steve Bromage: Uh, and they've got a strong presence in Maine.
• 37:02
  Steve Bromage: Um, and they really support a lot of jobs here and Memic and uh one of our major important insurance companies.
• 37:08
  Steve Bromage: So the enthusiasm, this was two months ago, we didn't know if we could do this.
• 37:12
  Steve Bromage: We had an idea and a plan, and we knew we had to go out and hustle very quickly um to see if we could make it happen.
• 37:18
  Steve Bromage: And the the um the reaction and the support uh from these companies and some individual donors has been so powerful.
• 37:25
  Steve Bromage: And so we're just building ahead of steam and it's gonna be quite a year.
• 37:29
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 37:30
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 37:30
  Crista Cowan: Well, from being a kid standing on the sidelines at the 200th anniversary of America in Philadelphia, watching that parade, to the trips you took with your family back and forth to Maine to your family camp.
• 37:42
  Crista Cowan: Um, the fact that you've chosen to make it your home and to, you know, make it your career to honor that state, I think is just a really beautiful story arc in and of itself.
• 37:53
  Crista Cowan: As you think about that, your, you know, think about your career, think about what you have planned next.
• 37:58
  Crista Cowan: How, you know, how has your feeling about your connection to Maine changed from the time you were a kid or even a young adult looking to move there to how you feel about the state now?
• 38:10
  Steve Bromage: Yeah, I just feel so lucky and so blessed to, you know, have, you know, to not only love Maine so much, but to have this job and this position and this opportunity to really give back and contribute and to really develop this organization and a team that is so committed to these things.
• 38:25
  Steve Bromage: You know, again, I think, you know, all of us in the field really want to make history relevant and important and impactful.
• 38:32
  Steve Bromage: And I think we've really imagined and developed a way to do it.
• 38:36
  Steve Bromage: So there's so much work to do, but I just feel so lucky that my life's work is about trying to give back to Maine.
• 38:42
  Steve Bromage: And history is such an amazing way to do it.
• 38:45
  Crista Cowan: Well, Steve, thank you for the work you're doing that benefits all of us, anyone with Maine roots, uh, as well as those there in the state today.
• 38:53
  Crista Cowan: And thank you for sharing your story with us.
• 38:56
  Steve Bromage: Well, thank you so much for giving us this opportunity.
• 38:59
  Steve Bromage: And here's to you know, all these states that you're recognizing, celebrating, and here's us all coming together and really recognizing what unites us and who we want to be as a country.
• 39:07
  Steve Bromage: So really appreciate it.
• 39:10
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.