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"We have wasted our inheritance by improvidence and mismanagement."-William K. Brooks, on the Chesapeake Bay's declining oyster harvests, 1905 The Chesapeake Bay oyster has changed little, if at all, in the century since this popular book was published. But the oyster harvest has fallen to its lowest level on record-from 15 million bushels at the turn of the century to fewer than 100,000 bushels in 1993. What was once the most bountiful source of oysters in the world has become nearly exhausted. More than a century ago, explains Kennedy T. Paynter Jr. in the introduction to the present volume, scientist and Maryland state official William K. Brooks warned that this day would come. A classical morphologist by training, and one of the Johns Hopkins University's first and most distinguished faculty members, Brooks had "tonged oysters in five different states" when the governor of Maryland appointed him Oyster Commissioner in 1882. The Oyster, first published in 1891, is a popular scientific account of what he knew and what he learned on the job.After describing the basic biology of the oyster, Brooks discusses its tremendous reproductive capacity, what it eats, how it lives, why it thrives in the Bay, and what role it plays in the Bay's ecology. But The Oyster is more than a simple biology text. It is also a critical scientific review of oyster management in the Chesapeake Bay, commenting on and criticizing contemporary laws and regulatory practices-many of which are still in place today. The book is therefore as timely now as it was when first published. A new introduction from Kennedy T. Paynter Jr. brings the story into modern focus and again charges the reader with the responsibility of caring for the life of the Bay.

Women, we are told, should not own guns. Women, we are told, are more likely to be injured by their own guns than to fend off an attack themselves. This "fact" is rooted in a fundamental assumption of female weakness and vulnerability. Why should a woman not be every bit as capable as a man of using a firearm in self-defense?And yet the reality is that millions of American women--somewhere between 11,000,000 and 17,000,000--use guns confidently and competently every day. Women are hunting, using firearms in their work as policewomen and in the military, shooting for sport, and arming themselves for personal security in ever-increasing numbers. What motivates women to possess firearms? What is their relationship to their guns? And who exactly are these women? Crucially, can a woman be a gun-owner and a feminist too?Women's growing tendency to arm themselves has in recent years been political fodder for both the right and the left. Female gun owners are frequently painted as "trying to be like men" (the conservative perspective) or "capitulating to patriarchal ideas about power" (the liberal critique). Eschewing the polar extremes in the heated debate over gun ownership and gun control, and linking firearms and feminism in novel fashion, Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster here cut through the rhetoric to paint a precise and unflinching account of America's gun women.

In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry.Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin.But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level.The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry.Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin.But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level.The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.