This year has been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the business shutdown, spiking unemployment, social unrest and a host of health and economic challenges.
We will likely look back on it as a year when businesses either closed, pivoted or somehow were in the right place at the right time. We will likely look back at how it changed the workforce, forcing us to work from home (if we were lucky enough to be working at all). We will likely savor the additional time we had with family, while missing the friends and loved ones we could not visit. We will likely look with introspection at the role we play in movements like Black Lives Matter, asking how we can do better or what we could do differently.
Much of this issue is devoted to looking back even further, to Maine’s 200 years since becoming a state in 1820. The celebration of Maine’s bicentennial year has taken back seat to all of this, but it’s actually a good time to measure where we are as a state. In this issue, the Mainebiz staff took a look at 200 years of ideas, innovations and products. There are undoubtedly 1.3 million ways to look at Maine’s history — one for each resident. We might have overlooked a couple here or paid too much attention to others over there. I’ll let you be the judge.
At the end of the day, I’m glad to be living in Maine today. As much as I look back fondly on different periods of Maine’s history, we have some good momentum going. Entrepreneurs are coming up with new ideas, innovations and products every day. And Mainebiz is enjoying watching it happen.
