Teacher Resources
Maine
Maine, then part of Massachusetts, suffered some of the war's earliest British raids — Falmouth (now Portland) was bombarded and burned in 1775 — and its Penobscot Expedition of 1779 was one of the largest American naval disasters.
The Penobscot Expedition is one of the war's great forgotten catastrophes: a combined Massachusetts naval and land force sent to dislodge a British fort at Castine was routed so completely that the American commanders scuttled their own fleet to prevent capture. The disaster led to court-martial proceedings and the ruin of several careers. Teaching Maine means teaching students about military failure, accountability, and the enormous gap between the war's heroic mythology and its often chaotic reality.
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