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Inside Camp David : the private world of the presidential retreat
\"Combining ... first-person anecdotes of the presidents and their families with years of storied history and interviews with commanders past and present, [this book] reveals the intimate connection felt by the First Family with this historic retreat\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Every home a distillery : alcohol, gender, and technology in the colonial Chesapeake
In this original examination of alcohol production in early America, Sarah Hand Meacham uncovers the crucial role women played in cidering and distilling in the colonial Chesapeake. Her fascinating story is one defined by gender, class, technology, and changing patterns of production. Alcohol was essential to colonial life; the region's water was foul, milk was generally unavailable, and tea and coffee were far too expensive for all but the very wealthy. Colonists used alcohol to drink, in cooking, as a cleaning agent, in beauty products, and as medicine. Meacham finds that the distillation and brewing of alcohol for these purposes traditionally fell to women. Advice and recipes in such guidebooks as The Accomplisht Ladys Delight demonstrate that women were the main producers of alcohol until the middle of the 18th century. Men, mostly small planters, then supplanted women, using new and cheaper technologies to make the region's cider, ale, and whiskey. Meacham compares alcohol production in the Chesapeake with that in New England, the middle colonies, and Europe, finding the Chesapeake to be far more isolated than even the other American colonies. She explains how home brewers used new technologies, such as small alembic stills and inexpensive cider pressing machines, in their alcoholic enterprises. She links the importation of coffee and tea in America to the temperance movement, showing how the wealthy became concerned with alcohol consumption only after they found something less inebriating to drink. Taking a few pages from contemporary guidebooks, Every Home a Distillery includes samples of historic recipes and instructions on how to make alcoholic beverages. American historians will find this study both enlightening and surprising.
eBook
Saving the Chesapeake Bay
Since the 1970s, conservation in the Chesapeake Bay watershed has been a major focus of local environmental groups as well as the federal government. The health of the estuary has been evaluated by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, among other organizations, for years and still needs a lot of help. Readers will delve into the important task of saving the Chesapeake Bay through statistics about the bay s health and engaging sidebars full of even more information. Vivid photographs reveal the dangers of pollution and urban sprawl as the main content introduces readers to endangered animals and plants, troubled habitats, and the problem of population growth. The struggles of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay will engage seafood lovers and conservationists alike to take action, even if only in their daily lives.
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Hirelings
InHirelings, Jennifer Dorsey recreates the social and economic milieu of Maryland's Eastern Shore at a time when black slavery and black freedom existed side by side. She follows a generation of manumitted African Americans and their freeborn children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, associations, and communities in the early nineteenth century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but before the American Revolution they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the Eastern Shore's economy and society, earning their livings as wage laborers while establishing thriving African American communities.
As free workers in a slave society, these African Americans contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters' authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited the needs of their households, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers as a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers' control. They demonstrated that independent and free African American communities could thrive on their own terms. In all of these actions the free black workers of the Eastern Shore played a pivotal role in ongoing debates about the merits of a free labor system.
eBook
Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past
In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a
variety of sources and disciplinary
approaches—archaeological, historical, architectural,
literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on,
convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful
Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in
which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the
antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and
preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into
historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines
include the region’s vanishing tobacco farms; St.
Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first
capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and
Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured
Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author
explores the historical narratives associated with such places,
she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as
competing ones. St. Mary’s City, for example, early on
became the center of Maryland’s “founding
narrative” of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in
nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in
local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point
Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate
Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus
nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in
the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre
state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the
area’s Civil War history, preferring instead to
concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular
element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As
King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public
memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region’s
more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and
race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical
archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives,
King calls for research—particularly archaeological
research—that produces new stories and
“counter-narratives” that challenge old perceptions
and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a
complicated past.
eBook
Plants and animals of the Chesapeake Bay
Chesapeake Bay is bursting with life. Schools of silvery menhaden dart around under the water s surface. Waterfowl call to each other and dive for delicious seafood snacks. More than 2,000 kinds of plants wave in the ocean breeze or grow in the swamps and shallows nearby. Readers will learn about some of the many plants and animals living in and around Chesapeake Bay, and the habitats they live in. Vivid photographs will invite readers to plunge the bay s depths for oysters, while sidebars introduce the effects of global climate change and overfishing, and the importance of conservation. A colorful cutaway map of the whole bay ecosystem will help readers consider the links between the plants and animals there as the main content complements the social studies curriculum.
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Brown in Baltimore
In the first book to present the history of Baltimore school desegregation, Howell S. Baum shows how good intentions got stuck on what Gunnar Myrdal called the \"American Dilemma.\" Immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the city's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary. Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else. Baum finds that American liberalism is the key to explaining how this happened. Myrdal observed that many whites believed in equality in the abstract but considered blacks inferior and treated them unequally. School officials were classical liberals who saw the world in terms of individuals, not races. They adopted a desegregation policy that explicitly ignored students' race and asserted that all students were equal in freedom to choose schools, while their policy let whites who disliked blacks avoid integration. School officials' liberal thinking hindered them from understanding or talking about the city's history of racial segregation, continuing barriers to desegregation, and realistic change strategies. From the classroom to city hall, Baum examines how Baltimore's distinct identity as a border city between North and South shaped local conversations about the national conflict over race and equality. The city's history of wrestling with the legacy of Brown reveals Americans' preferred way of dealing with racial issues: not talking about race. This avoidance, Baum concludes, allows segregation to continue.
eBook
Taking the Land to Make the City
The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the country’s formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities—specifically San Francisco and Baltimore—were essential parties to the creation of the republics of the United States and Mexico. Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early trading centers whose coastal locations immersed them in an international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded landscape forms associated with the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.
eBook