This reference traces the region's 400-year recorded hurricane history, from Jamestown to the present, drawing on accounts in newspaper articles, books, private journals, and interviews. Emphasizing the human side of a hurricane's aftermath rather than scientific aspects, each hurricane account tells how individuals and communities reacted to the storms. Storms are profiled in year-by-year entries from the 1600's to the current century.
The Mid-Atlantic region is a mixture of large, bustling cities, and sparsely populated rural areas. Its coastal areas, including Ellis Island and New York City, are centers of immigration and trade. Rivers and the Erie Canal helped connect the port cities to the interior parts of this region and to the rest of the nation. Through writing prompts and sidebars, readers will be asked to consider what life was like after the Erie Canal opened, and they will also find out about a local Native American myth related to Niagara Falls. These added elements help strengthen readers’ skills with informational text and tie directly to the Common Core standards.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic and columnist goes on the road--in a travel book as unabashed and insightful as the author himself. Deciding to clarify the image of his home ground firsthand, Yardley set out on a trek of discovery in the car of his dreams, beginning in his adopted hometown of Baltimore and stopping at many evocative places.
NATIONAL BEST SELLER • The basis for the HBO documentary now streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
Takes us into the eighteenth-century backyards of colonial America. He explores the many small outbuildings that can still be found at obscure rural farmsteads throughout throughout the Tidewater and greater mid-Atlantic, in towns like Williamsburg and Annapolis, and at elite plantations such as Mount Vernon and Monticello. Explains how these well-made buildings actually functioned. The author is riveted by the history of outbuildings: their architecture, patterns of use, folklore, and even their literary presence. In two appendixes he also considers octagonal and hexagonal structures, which had special significance, both doctrinal and cultural, in early America.--from publisher description.
Examining interactions between native Americans and whites in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, Jane Merritt traces the emergence of race as the defining difference between these neighbors on the frontier. Before 1755, Indian and white communities in Pennsylvania shared a certain amount of interdependence. They traded skills and resources and found a common enemy in the colonial authorities, including the powerful Six Nations, who attempted to control them and the land they inhabited. Using innovative research in German Moravian records, among other sources, Merritt explores the cultural practices, social needs, gender dynamics, economic exigencies, and political forces that brought native Americans and Euramericans together in the first half of the eighteenth century. But as Merritt demonstrates, the tolerance and even cooperation that once marked relations between Indians and whites collapsed during the Seven Years' War. By the 1760s, as the white population increased, a stronger, nationalist identity emerged among both white and Indian populations, each calling for new territorial and political boundaries to separate their communities. Differences between Indians and whites--whether political, economic, social, religious, or ethnic--became increasingly characterized in racial terms, and the resulting animosity left an enduring legacy in Pennsylvania's colonial history.
Interest in the history and preservation of lighthouses has never been stronger. Lighthouses of the Mid-Atlantic Coast details the history of lighthouses and much more, and shows why these structures continue to fascinate us. Discover what life for lighthouse keepers was really like. Learn about the history of U.S. colonial lighthouses and the role lighthouses have played in several wars. Meet the brave, nefarious, and colorful characters who served as lighthouse keepers and government overseers. Learn about lighthouse technology and architecture and find out how these treasures are being preserved.
