Maryland Paperback Bookshelf – serie

Memories of the author's youth are incorporated in a novel about the boyhood escapades of Noah Marlin, the son of a Chesapeake Bay waterman.

The first umbrella in America and a Washington monument that predates the one in the nation's capital were raised in Baltimore. A renowned beauty of the city, Betsy Patterson, married Jerome Bonaparte, but was forbidden by her brother-in-law, Napoleon, from ever setting foot in France. A century later, Wallis Warfield, another Baltimorean, made her own assault on European royalty. Baltimore is the city of Babe Ruth and H.L. Mencken and the final resting-place of Edgar Allan Poe. "The gastronomic metropolis of the Union," according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, it is also the home of Bromo-Seltzer. First published in 1951, The Amiable Baltimoreans presents 250 years of anecdotal history about the city-its buildings, its institutions, its customs, and most of all, its people. Informative, amusing, and sometimes discomforting, it offers an incomparable look into the city's past and revealing insight into the way it seemed to one informed observer thirty years ago.

It is not surprising to anyone who knows the Bay country that the Chesapeake captured the imagination of Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries," writes Arthur Pierce Middleton in this classic maritime history of the earliest years of Maryland and Virginia. "It was called the 'Noblest Bay in the Universe' in which the whole navies of Great Britain, France and the Netherlands might simultaneously ride at anchor." "Tobacco Coast" is the history of how the Chesapeake Bay shaped the society and economy of an entire region. Its hundreds of miles of navigable tributaries made adoption of the tobacco staples possible and eliminated the necessity of cities and towns; its physical dominance created an "essential unity" of lands sharing its shores, despite the political decisions that created the separate colonies of Maryland and Virginia.Middleton recaptures the peril faced by the early colonists (Father Andrew White, who arrived in the Ark, wrote that "all the Sprights and witches of Maryland" seemed arrayed in battle against the ship when violent storms struck off the coast) and traces how the settlers persevered and the colonies thrived, due in great measure to the growth of tobacco as the mainstay of Chesapeake commerce (in 1775 it represented over 75 percent of the total value of exports from the Chesapeake colonies and was worth some $4 million). Colonial life and commerce, shipbuilding and the merchant marine, privateers and self-protection--are all treated with insight, drama, and thoroughness in a fascinating maritime history, long out of print and now widely made available for the first time.

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal from the American Museum of Natural HistoryExamines the complex ecology of Chesapeake Bay, and observes its marshes and swamps, and its jellyfish, ospreys, and fiddler crabs.

For three hundred years, generations of Tilghman Islanders have lived by harvesting the waters of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. They are watermen, an old English term for commercial fishermen, and their lives today retain much of the spirit and simplicity that characterized their land's first Anglo-Saxon settlers. Watermen is the story of their lives told by Randy Peffer, a young writer who came to Tilghman Island to search for his ancestral roots and left a year later with the makings of this book. Watermen is a singular work, a book that will touch anyone who has ever glimpsed the peope of the Chesapeake, whether in literature or in life.

Originally published in 1939, Miss Susie Slagle's spent half a year on the national best-seller lists, went through twenty-three hardcover printings, and became a major Hollywood motion picture produced by John Houseman. Now Augusta Tucker's beloved novel of Baltimore in the halcyon years before the Great War -- and of the Johns Hopkins medical students who boarded at Miss Susie Slagle's house on Biddle Street -- is reissued in the Maryland Paperback Bookshelf. Richly detailed and warmly nostalgic, Miss Susie Slagle's is about to charm a new generation of readers.

Since first published in 1947, Spring in Washington has become a beloved classic of nature writing. It is now brought back into print, complete with the original drawings by Francis L. Jaques. "As I reflect on the multitude of books published and read over the past thirty years, I can think of none to which I have returned more often and with more constant satisfaction than Louis Halle's Halle's Spring in Washington, a mixture of ornithology, international affairs, and reflections on the human scene, " wrote John W Nason in the American Scholar in 1961. "Written by a State Department official during World War II, it is an escape to the real world of nature and man. 'To snatch the passing moment and examine it for eternity is the noblest of occupations, ' writes Halle. He does so with quiet wisdom and originality. To read him is inevitably to share his passion." In the form of a journal, the book takes the reader along on excursions through Washington and its environs -- the Tidal Basin, Rock Creek Park, and beyond -- to experience the rebirth of the season. To the movement of winds and skies, the migrations of birds, the budding of plants and trees, Mr.Halle brings a quick and observant eye. But more important, he brings an imagination that can evoke in the reader a new perception of the drama in the universe around him.

Published in hardcover in 1965 and long out of print, this lively and accurate adventure tale is now available in paperback for the first time. As a fictionalized account of life on the Chesapeake Bay at the turn of the century, "Run to the Lee" has the same appeal to all ages as Gilbert Byron's own beloved novel, "The Lord's Oysters".

Winner of the Book Prize from the Maryland Historical Association "A richer reflection of life in early 19th-century Maryland and the Washington environs cannot be found . . . These superb letters are enhanced by able editing, both in footnotes and excellent essays at the beginning and end." —Washington Post Book World"Callcott is a suberb editor; she has exhaustively researched every aspect of Calvert's life, and her introductory and concluding essays, including an account of George Calvert's relationship with a slave woman, which produced five children, contain much information of interest." —Elizabeth R. Baer, Belles Lettres"These letters document the timeless elements of domestic life—family relationships, childbirth, illness, househld chores—but they offer far more than the familiar fare of the plantation mistress."—Patricia Brady, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

Originally published in hardback, this book about the Chesapeake is now available in paperback from Johns Hopkins. The author, Tom Horton, is a native of Maryland's Eastern Shore, and has written about the environment for the past 15 years in the "Baltimore Sun". His stories of oysters and sea nettle, elms and rivers, barrier islands and blue crabs, farmers and watermen, always reach beyond the local to the most universal of subjects.

"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.

"The subject of this book pertains to events, often unpleasant, in the domestic lives of the 17th-century Maryland colonists."-publisher's catalog description, 1938 Marylander Edward Erbery called members of the colony's proprietary assembly "rogues and puppies"; he was tied to an apple tree and received thirty-nine lashes. Jacob Lumbrozo, a Maryland Jew who suggested Christ's miracles were done by "magic," was imprisoned indefinitely, escaping execution only by the governor's pardon. Rebecca Fowler was accused of using witchcraft to cause her Calvert County neighbors to feel "very much the worse;" she was hanged on October 9, 1685. Mrs. Thomas Ward whipped a runaway maidservant with a peachtree rod, then rubbed salt into the girl's wounds; the girl died, and Mrs. Ward was fined three hundred pounds of tobacco. Now available in a new paperback edition, Raphael Semmes's classic Crime and Punishment in Colonial Maryland contains a wealth of colorful-though often disturbing-details about the law and lawbreakers in 17th-century Maryland. Semmes explains, for instance, that theft was rare among early Marylanders-if only because the colonists had little worth stealing.But what the colonists valued, they endeavored to protect: A 1662 law punished a person twice-convicted of hog-stealing by branding an "H" on his shoulder. (Widely perceived as being too lenient, the law was amended four years later: first offense, "H" on the forehead.) Men caught in adultery were often fined; women were often whipped. And knowing how to swim was so rare among 17th-century women that suggesting one could do so was tantamount to accusing her of witchcraft: a minister's son who claimed as much was sued by the woman for defamation of character. Crime and Punishment in Colonial Maryland offers fascinating and detailed case histories on such crimes as theft, libel, assault and homicide, as well as on adultery, profanity, drunkenness, and witchcraft. It also explores long-forgotten aspects of old English law, such as theftbote (an early form of "victim compensation"), deodand (an animal or article which, having caused the death of a human being, was forfeited to the Crown for "pious uses"), and the blood test for murderers.

Chesapeake Boyhood is an account of growing up on the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake during the years following the Great Depression. Turner's stories include rousing tales of 'coon hunting, crabbing, boat building, duck hunting, oyster tonging, and Saturday jaunts to town. Turner brings the characters, experiences, waterscape, and landscape of rural Virginia to life as no one has done before or is likely ever to do again. His own drawings illustrate the stories, and they, too, win us over with their honesty and charm. "Its chief virtue (besides its highly literate style), it seems to me, is its intimate, sensory knowledge of a vanishing Chesapeake landscape: its sounds and smells, the way things feel to the touch, the lore lodged in the names of the commonest creatures and activities ...At one point Turner likens the local farmers and fishermen sitting around the table in the country store to fixed positions on a compass, with 'all the cardinal points taken,' and I think of this [book] as a kind of compass too, that describes one man's orientation to the Eastern Shore."--Andrea Hammer, St.Mary's College "Modern outdoor writing has enough anemic adventures by faint-hearted writers reared in the suburbs. What it needs more of is the droll wit of an Ed Zern, the robust foolishness of a Patrick McManus, and the lean prose of an Ernest Hemingway. It gets all three in the tales of Bill Turner."--George Regier, author of Heron Hill Chronicle and Wanderer on My Native Shore "Storms, boat wrecks, childhood pranks and even old dogs are remembered with a sense of humor in Turner's book. He has captured the rhythms of country life in a time before fast cars, credit cards, and air pollution."-Waterman's Gazette

A teacher of English and English History at the Friends School in Baltimore, Letitia Stockett was inspired to write her whimsical history of the city when a friend told her that nothing much had been done in the way of a history of Baltimore since J. Thomas Scharf's The Chronicles of Baltimore (1874). Rising to the challenge, she spent all of her spare time on the book, telling curious friends and family merely that she "had work to do." Baltimore: A Not Too Serious History was the result, a charming and anecdotal account of the city's history that is as fresh today as it was when first published in 1928. "Would you know Baltimore? Then put deliberately out of your mind the fact that the town makes more straw hats than any other city in the world. Aesthetically speaking, that is a fearsome thought. Forget, too, that Baltimore is the centre of the oyster packing industry. Worse, far worse than a straw hat is a packed oyster; Baltimoreans ought to know better. In truth they do; they export the tinned bivalve to the unsuspecting, unsophisticated Westerner.These two enterprises are worthy and profitable, but a knowledge of these facts will not help you understand this city any more truly than the study of those long lists of products once diligently conned in school gave you an inkling of Tunis, Singapore and Wilkes-Barre."-from Baltimore: A Not too Serious History

In this first comprehensive literary history of Baltimore and Maryland (with notes on Washington writers), Frank R. Shivers, Jr., explores the region's long-overlooked but substantial contribution to American letters. In picture and story, Shivers's lively account ranges from the colonial satire of Ebenezer Cook, to the National Anthem of Francis Scott Key, to the acclaimed works of Poe, Mencken, and Fitzgerald. Here are surprising stories of Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Dashiel Hammett, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and other writers influenced by Chesapeake culture-an influence still fresh in the work of such contemporary writers as John Barth, Anne Tyler, and Russell Baker. "Nothing," wrote Gertrude Stein, "really can stop anyone living and feeling as they do in Baltimore." As entertaining as it is informative, Maryland Wits and Baltimore Bards shows us why.

In the summer of 1814, enemy naval and ground forces made a coordinated assault on Washington, DC, capital of the new republic, and then set their sights on Baltimore, home port to some of the most rapacious American privateers on the high seas. In "The Dawn's Early Light", Walter Lord captures these events during the War of 1812. A native Baltimorean, Lord wrote with great force and feeling of the subsequent defense of Fort McHenry, the circumstances of Francis Scott Key's writing of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and the rebirth of a young country. Students consider this book to be one of the best short narratives of the Chesapeake campaign. This reissue of "The Dawn's Early Light" celebrates the bicentennial of the Battle of Baltimore. Scott S. Sheads, a National Park Service ranger and specialist on the event, introduces the book, which will remain a popular favorite for years to come.

This richly illustrated and engagingly written book tells the story of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from its origins in George Washington's decision to link the nation's new capital with the western frontier; through the beginning of construction in 1828 (fatefully, on the same day that the cornerstone of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad was set); to the "completion" of the project. Planned to go as far as Ohio and to take twelve years in construction, the Canal company's ambitions were scaled back after 22 years of toil, 14 million in expense, and the bankruptcy of several contractors took them only as far as Cumberland, at the eastern shed of the Alleghenies. Describing in detail how the C&O operated in its heyday, Elizabeth Kytle takes the story through the shut-down of operations in 1924, after the Canal was purchased by its competitor, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the efforts that resulted in its preservation as a National Historical Park in 1971. Enriching this narrative, the book also provides oral history accounts of eleven men and women who worked on or grew up along the banks of the Canal. "

In this personal and moving book, William Gildea blends reminiscences of his boyhood in Baltimore with profiles of famous Colts players such as Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore, Gino Marchetti, Raymond Berry, Art Donovan, Y. A. Tittle, and others. Recalling his relationship with his father and the love they shared for a team, Gildea evokes the spirit of 1950s America, when professional athletes were workaday neighbors and community was more than a political slogan. This is a story, too, about the geography of the heart: why something so simple as a team can arouse such emotional attachments, how a group of players with horseshoes on their helmets could have been part of the generational glue between parent and child. Written with feeling and insight, this is an affecting tribute to a team and a time etched in memory.

For nearly fifty years, A. Aubrey Bodine was a Maryland institution, the photographer for the Baltimore Sunday Sun. Surveying the entire range of his work (there are ten thousand Bodine negatives in Baltimore's Peale Museum alone) Kathleen Ewing has selected sixty-eight photographs to show the photographer at his representative-and sometimes surprising-best. In her accompanying text, Ewing places Bodine's work in the romantic pictorial tradition, alongside the early work of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Westen, Laura Gilpin, and others. Bodine is perhaps best remembered for his photographs of the Chesapeake Bay and its watermen, but he was also a portrait photographer of consummate skill, capturing subjects as diverse as a group of Amish children and H. L. Mencken by his woodpile on his seventy-fifth birthday. His images of blazing Bessemer steel furnaces and shining barn roofs are equally striking. While Bodine's camera focused mainly on Maryland, he occasionally ventured beyond to show misty rooftops in Nuremberg or championship boxers. A.Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore Pictorialist is a book to be treasured by Marylanders rediscovering an old friend as well as by admirers of photography seeing for the first time the work of a fine American artist.

Maryland: A Middle Temperament explores the ironies, contradictions, and compromises that give "America's oldest border state" its special character. Extensively illustrated and accompanied by bibliography, maps, charts, and tables, Robert Brugger's vivid account of the state's political, economic, social, and cultural heritage-from the outfitting of Cecil Calvert's expedition to the opening of Baltimore's Harborplace-is rich in the issues and personalities that make up Maryland's story and explain its "middle temperament."