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George J. Mitchell Oral History Project
Between 2008 and 2011, the Bowdoin College Library conducted an oral history project to create a collection of spoken recollections and personal impressions from individuals who have known George J. Mitchell in a variety of ways. These oral histories document his life and career from early childhood onward, with particular emphasis on his public service to Maine and to the nation, and they complement his personal papers, which are also held by Bowdoin College. Interviewees include Senator Mitchell's Waterville (Maine) friends and acquaintances; family members; college classmates; Maine legislators; political associates and competitors; campaign supporters; U.S. Senate colleagues and staff members; public agency officials; foreign policy specialists; law practice associates; public policy advocates; board members of various affiliations; and friends. Because oral history recordings are intrinsically informal, spontaneous, and candid, they characterize events and personalities in ways that are otherwise silent in the historical record. In particular, they capture personal knowledge and institutional memory about people, occasions, and processes that are rarely documented elsewhere. Thus, these oral histories provide an invaluable resource in understanding both the recent past and how individuals have played essential roles in shaping the present. TRANSCRIPT GUIDELINES Every attempt has been made to create transcripts that reflect the recorded interviews accurately. Interviewees were given the opportunity to edit their transcripts to correct errors of transcription and fact (often, for example, a recollection might have included a misremembered date or place), or to enhance clarity of expression. Additions and minor deletions or changes are indicated in the transcript by closed brackets ([ ]); more substantive omissions are noted as: [p/o] (i.e. “[phrase omitted]”). ATTRIBUTION These recordings and transcripts are provided for educational use, private study, and research. Brief quotations for academic purposes and other uses that fall within “fair use” (Title 17, United States Code) require proper attribution customary to the discipline or community. All other uses not protected by “fair use,” including derivation, publication, and reproduction, require written permission from Bowdoin College. In citing these interviews, specify the interviewee, interviewer, and interview date following the style found in the example below: George J. Mitchell, interview by Andrea L’Hommedieu, 10 May 2011, George J. Mitchell Oral History Project, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine.


Interview with Paul Sarbanes by Diane Dewhirst

Date: 2009-09-29

Creator: Paul Sarbanes

Access: Open access

Biographial Note

Paul Sarbanes was born on February 3, 1933 in Salisbury, Maryland. He attended Princeton University and continued his studies at Balliol College of the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then attended Harvard Law School. He served as a Democrat from Maryland in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971 to 1977 and in the U.S. Senate from 1977 to 2007. He was the first Greek American senator and notably co-sponsored the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, which strengthened corporate governance and created a federal oversight board for the accounting industry.

Summary

Interview includes discussion of: George Mitchell’s personality; winning back the Senate majority in 1986; the Senate Majority Leader race of 1989; George Mitchell’s departure from the Senate; partisanship; and an anecdote about George Mitchell and Senator John Warner during an “old-style” filibuster.




Economic Analysis of the Critical Habitat Designation Process for Endangered and Threatened Species Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Katherine Fosburgh

Access: Open access

Habitat destruction is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in the US. Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), habitat deemed essential to endangered and threatened species recovery is proposed as critical habitat (CH). CH areas are subject to regulations that could alter land development plans or increase costs. The potential economic opportunity cost created by CH regulations may lead to the exclusion of land proposed for CH designation, thereby reducing the conservation benefits of the CH rule. In this paper, I use a unique dataset collected from Federal Register (FR) documents to estimate the reduction in CH acreage from proposed to final ruling, both on the extensive and intensive margin. I find a negative relationship between the level of household income in an area proposed for CH and the probability that a CH gains acreage or maintains acreage during the establishment process. I also find some evidence that higher household income in a CH area is associated with a greater relative loss in acreage between proposal and finalization. I also find that private land proposed for CH designation is less likely to be in the final designation than federal land. Overall, my results suggest that economic considerations influence CH allocation decisions. Whether reducing the amount of private land subject to CH designations is socially efficient depends on the unknown economic benefit of private land exclusions versus the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss that may result from not protecting all land deemed vital to species recovery.


ALGOrhythms: Leveraging Markov Chain-Based Generation of Functional Harmonies with User-Defined Musical Corpus as a Compositional Tool

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Coleman Brockmeier

Access: Open access

Music forms the soundtrack to daily life and serves as an important cultural marker for people around the world. As the world becomes digitized and connected via the internet, the opportunity is increasingly accessible for anyone to share music with the world and to create chart-topping music that defines the cultural vernacular. Many prominent producers have little to no formal musical training, especially in Western music theory. As a result, loop-based music dominates the lists of most-played music on the radio and streaming services, often not deviating from basic functional harmony. With this project, I have created a compositional tool in the form of an iOS app which identifies the harmonic “fingerprint” behind a given set of songs. The app then leverages this understanding to create sequences of chords in the style of that fingerprint. To accomplish this, the app employs web scraping to create a corpus of musical information in the form of Markov chains — a transition table which underlies the data set. I introduce the idea of musical “chunks” defining a harmonic “fingerprint” and various methods of traversing the transition table to create chord progressions employing the fingerprint as a guide. The tool allows for specification of corpus, chunk size, traversal method, and the ability to listen to, share, and save generated results. The resulting app is a tool that allows the user to answer the question: “What would happen if Stevie Wonder and Billie Eilish wrote a song together?”


Manuscripts
Special Collections & Archives holds nearly 650 manuscript collections that can be consulted in our secure reading room, and select materials are available online. Our particular collection strengths include materials related to abolitionism and anti-slavery movements in the United States, Arctic exploration, the Civil War and Reconstruction, natural history, local and regional history, and the personal and professional papers of many Bowdoin faculty and alumni.


Transcending the Clinical: Empathic Care Work, Moral Injury, and the Community Health Worker in Rural Maine

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Anneke Halliday

Access: Open access

The Maine Mobile Health Program is a federally qualified health center and community health organization that provides healthcare to migrant and seasonal farmworkers in rural Maine. The MMHP employs community health workers to act as negotiators between unjust systems, physicians, and patients. This thesis investigates the ways in which community health workers provide patients with “empathic care” and details how this happens in practice based on field observations and interviews. It also addresses how empathic care benefits patients by creating empowerment, building trust, and giving patients agency in their healthcare decision making. Furthermore, this thesis discusses the cost of providing empathic care as “moral injury” and considers how community health workers are emotionally and psychologically impacted by the work that they do. Ultimately, this thesis illuminates the transformative capacity of empathic care and the burden it imposes on community health workers operating within inequitable systems.