The Davistown Museum has many bibliographies as listed below. To the right of each bibliography is the number of the volume in which the bibliography appears on the website and is published in hard copy. All hard copy museum publications include the bibliographies listed below. Disclaimer: the bibliographies listed below are simply those we found useful and interesting during museum reseach projects. It is not the contention of the Davistown Museum that any particular bibliography represents a definitive list of the publications on that topic. For a detailed guide to each bibliography, click here.
 

Local and Regional History

Contemporary: Principal References
Contemporary: Other References
Antiquarian: Pre-1940 References
Popular Authors
Maine Town Histories
The Mast Trade
Other Author's Bibliographies
Genealogy
Maps
Women

European Precedents and the Early Industrial Revolution (Volume 6 - Steel- and Toolmaking Strategies and Techniques Before 1870)
Principal Bibliographic Sources for the Art of the Edge Tool (Volume 7 - Art of the Edge Tool)
The Industrial Revolution in America (Volume 8 - The Classic Period of American Toolmaking 1827 - 1930)
Tools of the Trades (Volume 8 )
US and New England Toolmakers (Volume 8 )
Tool Catalogs (Volume 8 )
Tool Journals, Newsletters, and Auction Listings (Volume 8 )
Principal Bibliographic Sources for the Glossary of Ferrous Metallurgy Terminology (Volume 11 - Handbook for Ironmongers)
Metallurgy (Volume 11 - Handbook for Ironmongers)
Collector's Guides, Handbooks, and Dictionaries

Museum Educational Information Resources

Section 2: Environmental History Department

Volume 15: Changes in the Land: Environmental History of Maine

Volume 4: Antibiotic Resistance: Bacteria, Viruses, Fungi and other Pathogens, A Threat to World Health

Volume 5: Nano- and Microplastics as Vectors of Environmental Contaminants Bibliography

Organizational Plan of the Bibliographies

The bibliographies are divided into two components: General Topics and Special Topics.  The citations listed in some of the bibliographies are also divided into antiquarian (before 1940) and contemporary sources.

The organization and content our libraries in Hulls Cove and at the museum in Liberty, and our website bibliographies, reflect the specialized focus of The Davistown Museum.  We are not attempting to provide a definitive bibliography on any subject.  Our intent is, rather, to compile listings of books and articles that we have found to be interesting, relevant or fun to read, for the use of anyone interested in the subjects we document.  From time to time important citations will appear more than once in the bibliographies because they are important information sources for more than one of our areas of special interest.

The special focus of our bibliographies includes the following:
A. The local and regional history of coastal Maine and New England including Davistown Plantation.
B. The history and fate of the Wawenoc Indians.
C. The history of tools, technology and hand tool manufacturing with an emphasis on woodworking tools, iron and steel production and the trades most important to Europeans settling in Maine after 1607.
D. The environmental history of Maine, including the extensive website environmental history archives and bibliographies of the Center for Biological Monitoring, now part of the museum.
E. Art and artists in Maine.

If you would like to help with the compilation of the Davistown bibliographies, if you have a citation of interest or a correction or suggestion you would like to share with us or if you would like to sponsor a special topic bibliography on any subject pertaining to Maine history please contact the museum.

General Topic Bibliographies

I. General History Sources: This section includes general background information about Maine and American history relevant to our main focus of interest, the history of Liberty and Montville prior to the Civil War.  The objective of the general history bibliography is to extract the most interesting citations on New England history from the labyrinth collections of the Maine Historical Society and elsewhere, annotate them as time allows and make the citations electronically available for interested history students anywhere.  Our Internet bibliographies are intended to complement the small collection of Maine history books that are available in the open stacks of our library, either in the museum or the Hulls Cove library locations.

II. Maine History Sources: The focus of this section is on interesting contemporary Maine history books as well as the most important antiquarian sources that contemporary authors frequently cite.  Among contemporary publications of most significance to The Davistown Museum are Alan Taylor's Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, which provided inspiration for the development of the Davistown History Project and Baker's American Beginnings, which delineates a controversy of special interest to The Davistown Museum with respect to the concept, identification and location of "Norumbega".  Our exploration of Maine history sources also includes numerous obscure, nearly forgotten or currently disdained antiquarian historians, whose work, though not always accurate, contains immense amounts of important information and oral traditions, including the intriguing role of ancient Pemaquid as a destination for fishermen and trades well before settlement of the Plymouth colony.

III. Native American history and culture in Maine: The third section of the general bibliographies, provides access to the vast literature on Native Americans in Maine.  Ranging from the absolutely essential publications of Bruce Bourque to the obscure and forgotten antiquarians such as Rufus King Sewall, our bibliographic citations include the most important publications about the prehistoric presence of Native Americans in Maine.  Our special focus is on Native American communities in the coastal tidewater downstream from the Davistown Plantation.  This bibliography includes all texts and journal articles that mention or discuss the presence, flight and dislocation of the Wawenoc community -- information essential to understanding the identity and activities of the later amalgam of epidemic and warfare survivors that the first Maine colonists encountered.  The museum uses the views expressed in Baker et. al. in American Beginnings that Norumbega was a cartographic myth as a starting point for exploring the Wawenoc diaspora.  A fundamental purpose of this bibliography is to counteract the gradual elimination of the Wawenoc community from our maps, our history books and our conception of Maine history.  Through the electronic reinscription of old, lost or obscure citations and commentaries, our mission is to foster a reconsideration of the history of the Wawenoc Indians and the confederacy of Mawooshen, of which they were a part, and to raise the question of the identity of Norumbega as a Native American place name denoting the marine resource rich area between the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers, including the Damariscotta shell middens.

IV. History of Tools & Tool Manufacturing: The focus of this Davistown Museum bibliography is the history and evolution of technology in America, especially with respect to the production of hand tools.  A large component of the exhibits in the museum consist of hand tools with interesting historical, esthetic or design characteristics collected in New England over the last 40 years by the Liberty Tool Co.  There is a small core of important histories, directories and reference books which most tool collectors, historians and students of the history of technology find essential to the understanding and identification of hand tools.  Some of these basic reference books are available for browsing in the Center for the Study of Early Tools Elliot Sayward Memorial Library or in the main hall of the museum.  All of these basic references are listed in our electronically accessible bibliography.  We hope our citations will be useful for both beginning and advanced students seeking a better understanding of the history of manufacture of hand tools in America and the role they have played in our local, regional and national history.

V. Environmental History:

A. Norumbega bioregion: Changes in the land.  This bibliography has the mission of documenting changes in the land that have occurred in the Norumbega bioregion as a result of human activities and technologies, especially those of the late 20th century.  Publications discussing changes in the land are divided into two sections.  The first includes those describing changes in the land during both the pre-contact and contact periods in New England including those occurring in the Norumbega bioregion and the Davistown Plantation.  The second component of this bibliography includes citations which document the massive changes that have occurred in the the 20th century in the ecology of the Norumbega bioregion.  A special long term museum research project of this bibliography will be to update the United States Mussel Watch with relevant citations that describe or document the impact of chemical fallout on marine food chains that are typical of those in coastal Maine.  As an introduction to this topic we include the recent state of Maine Department of Human Services' Maine 1997 fish consumption advisories.

B. Center for Biological Monitoring Archives: The bibliographies of the Center for Biological Monitoring begin with a large collection of journal articles on chemical fallout issues that are cited in the first section of our environmental history library (see above).  The special focus of the CBM archives are, however, naturally occurring and anthropogenic radioactivity.  The definitive summary of these sources remains the United Nations publication UNSCEAR: Sources of Ionizing Radiation .  The eBook publications of the Center for Biological Monitoring constitute a complete listing of all the bibliographic citations compiled by CBM over a period of almost three decades.  These citations cover a broad range of the available literature on anthropogenic radioactivity ranging from early research on weapons testing fallout to the Chernobyl accident, weapons production source points, nuclear powered satellite accident fallout, information on basic definitions, pathways of radioisotopes in the environment, safety guidelines in case of accidents and a wide variety of other subjects pertaining to radioactivity in the environment.  This vast literature is now part of the Davistown Museum bibliographies.  These archives also contain numerous citations and information pertaining to the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company in Wiscasset, Maine, as the most significant source point of anthropogenic radioactivity in the Norumbega bioregion.

On our website, but separate from the bibliographies is a list of Archaeology texts in the museum library and Archaeology or history-related journals.  We also have a listing on the website of other books in the Davistown Museum library that have been donated, but are not in one of our bibliographies.  These include many history, maritime and technology texts.