AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF MAINE, by Neil Rolde, illustration editor, Charles C. Calhoun, The Friends of the Maine State Museum, 212 pages, $55.

People of the Dawn (Wabanakiak or Abenaki) is what Maine’s first inhabitants called themselves, and it aptly describes Maine’s character, as readers of “An Illustrated History of Maine” discover in this intriguing revelation of Maine’s singular essence.

Beginning with an artist’s depiction of life among the paleo-Indians of northwestern Maine from 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, and Neil Rolde’s free-flowing prose, this work presents a most attractive overview of some of the many specimens and artifacts housed in the Maine State Museum in Augusta.

While inspiring readers to explore Maine’s colorful history, this beautiful coffee table book is candy to the eyes and mind, presenting just the right balance of prose and graphics.

Meant to educate as well as entertain, the slim volume is well worth the price. If it also spurs visitors to the museum to explore its “hidden treasures,” so much the better.

Imagine life on the tundra as you look at petroglyphs of hunting, fishing and shamanistic (religious) activities of paleo-Indians. Now, watch as 20th-century archaeologists excavate the bones of a wooly mammoth — extinct for thousands of years — which were unearthed near Scarborough. Rolde reminds us of old Indian legends about their ancestors using arrows tipped with ivory.

A rarer discovery, found on Blue Hill Bay, is a Norse silver penny, which offers evidence of an active trade between Indians and Viking settlers in Newfoundland. This authentic coin was issued during the reign of King Olav Kyrre, who lived from 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest of England, to 1093, four centuries before the European invasions of John Cabot and others.

Rolde examines the “colonization” of Maine by white settlers, some Catholic French, others English and Scottish Protestant, who withstood a cold and unyielding climate, disease and Indian wars in a continual struggle for survival.

Maine and its lush forests remained a pawn for European expansion as well as larger states such as Massachusetts, whose Pilgrims sustained their colony by engaging in fur trading with Indians and French-Canadians here.

In Rolde’s vivid account, three themes reverberate: continual violence (both physical and political) erupting into wars fought to establish control of the land and its rich resources; a desire that became an uncompromising demand for freedom from Great Britain and France, from Massachusetts, and from other “outsiders,” which explains its motto, “Dirigo,” (“I lead”) and its demand for statehood; and the triumph of the individual, as shown in the pioneering spirit that built this country and that is evident even now.

It is not unusual, therefore, for the writer to focus on Maine’s “firsts,” not all of which are admirable. For example, Maine was the site of the first recorded murders of Europeans when Capt. John Hocking shot a Pilgrim who was trying to cut his vessel’s cable, and was shot and killed in turn.

Despite efforts at religious tolerance, the first hate crime was committed when a Swiss-born priest named John Bapst was attacked by an anti-Catholic mob, beaten, stripped, tarred and feathered, and run out of town on a rail. He returned the next day to say Mass anyway. Happily, Maine’s other “firsts” are more positive.

“First to fight!” — when they heard of the Revolutionary battles at Concord and Lexington, 60 militiamen went to Massachusetts before being asked, and were among the first of many patriots to fight for freedom.

In the Civil War, for example, Col. Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine and his men saved the Union Army at Gettysburg, which led to a Congressional Medal of Honor for him as well as the right to receive Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattax.

The first antislavery movement started here in 1833, leading to the abolitionist movement of the 1850s; and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was one of many influential works.

The village at Togus was the first institution in the United States for disabled veterans. Hannibal Hamlin was the first Republican leader and became Lincoln’s vice president.

Gov. Percival Baxter was the first environmentalist, donating more than 200,000 acres of land to be protected as a national park. When women won the right to vote, Maine women were the first to vote in the national election in 1920.

Let us not forget Dora Pinkham, the state’s first female legislator; Gail Laughlin, the first female lawyer; and Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman nominated for the presidency and whose “Declaration of Conscience” awakened the Congress and America to the frightening consequences of Joe McCarthy’s “witch hunt” of the 1950s. When she ran for president in 1964, she garnered 30 percent of the vote and in 1989 was awarded a Medal of Freedom to recognize her contributions to Maine and to America.

This book also offers a vast and gorgeous array of paintings, sketches, pictures and photographs of some of Maine’s treasures, from ships to quilts, from furniture to ancient maps, houses to diaries.

My only complaint is that the book tends to focus too much attention on wars and politics, only offering glimpses of private life on occasion and supplying no more than pictures with captions for the vast array of artistic endeavors, writers, artisans and the like.

Women, too, are only in evidence in the written history in a section on women’s suffrage and the political movements of the 20th century. Despite this, a work that awakens us to our history enables us all to become People of the Dawn.

Linda L. Labin is an associate professor of English at Husson College.