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The Maryland History and Culture Bibliography

Garitee, Jerome R. The Republic's Private Navy: The American Privateering Business as Practiced Baltimore during the War of 1812. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, Published for Mystic Seaport, Inc., 1977.
Notes: The British attack on Baltimore during the War of 1812 was motivated by a desire to punish the city for being a nest of republicans and privateers. This book traces in admirable detail the history of privateering - from the ships, outfitting, captains and crews, investors, their successes and failures, through the distribution of the prize money. While the pirates on the Spanish main may have been the dregs of the sea, Baltimore's privateers were underwritten by some of its leading mercantile and political leaders. The book includes useful appendices identifying the privateers, investors and proceeds.

Abribat, Beverly. "The Jefferson Island Club." Weather Gauge 24 (Fall 1988): 10-21; 25 (Fall 1989): 8-14.

Atwood, Liz. "Jews in Maryland." Maryland 25 (Summer 1993): 19-25.

Beirne, D. Randall. "German Immigration to Nineteenth-Century Baltimore." Maryland Humanities (September/October 1994): 15-17.

Bonvillain, Dorothy Guy. Cultural Pluralism and the Americanization of Immigrants: The Role of Public Schools and Ethnic Communities, Baltimore, 1890-1920. Ph.D. diss., American University, 1999.

Cahn, Louis F. "Baltimore Jews and Baltimore Horses." Generations 3 (June 1982): 23-30.

Carey, George. "A Sampler of Baltimore's Folk Culture." Johns Hopkins Magazine 27 (January 1976): 8-12.
Notes: George Carey, former Maryland state folklorist, notes that folklore often has been understood as applying to rural and traditional ways of life, but he insists that the concept is equally relevant for the study of urban settings like Baltimore. The most obvious examples he finds in the city's ethnic neighborhoods, both European and African American, including Ukrainian-American Easter egg designs, window screens painted by Czech-Americans, and African-American A-rabing (street hawker) cries, songs, and storytelling.

Ellis, Carolyn. Fisher Folk: Two Communities on the Chesapeake Bay. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
Notes: A sociological case study of two traditional water-economy Chesapeake Bay communities, one in tidewater Virginia and the other on the islands of Maryland, both assigned pseudonyms in social science convention. Ellis contends that these isolated settlements retain distinctive elements of traditional culture, even as they increasingly are drawn into contact with and impacted by outside forces. Based on extensive field research conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s, this study examines family and kin, work, social organization, the role of religion, and mechanisms of social control. Ellis concludes with consideration of the prospects for the future in terms of preservation or change for traditional Chesapeake area communities.

Fee, Elizabeth, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman, eds. The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Notes: Essays on aspects of the social history of Baltimore provide case studies of social issues and neighborhood dynamics. Paired chapters first consider the lives of ordinary B&O Railroad workers involved in the railroad strike of 1877, then examine the powerful family of B&O magnate John Work Garrett. Chapters on work consider the area's mill villages, the garment industry, and union activity. Studies of neighborhoods address the history of Fells Point in terms of race and ethnicity and racial change in west Baltimore.

Feest, Christian F. "Ethnohistory, Moral History, and Colonial Maryland." Amerikastudien 28 (No. 4 1983): 429-433.

Fein, Isaac. The Making of an American Jewish Community: The History of Baltimore Jewry from 1773 to 1920. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971.

Feldman, Dianne. "The Mystery of Rodeph Schalem: Exploring a Jewish Organization Lost to History." Generations (Fall 1998): 17-19.

Horton, Tom. An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake. New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1996.
Notes: Horton's title suggests his principal themes in examining Smith Island life: that the islands represent a distinctive way of life rooted in another time whose preservation into the future may literally be running out of time. An environmental columnist for the Baltimore <em>Sun</em> who lived on Smith Island in the late 1980s as an environmental educator with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Horton examines the water-related economy, traditionally based on oystering and crabbing, and the unique way of life that evolved in the relative isolation of the island communities. His book profiles the personalities of Smith Island, the work of men and women, the pervasive role of religion in island life, and social, economic, and environmental changes threatening the island's future.

Kelbaugh, Jack, and Fred Fetrow. "Murder, Music, and Meteorology: When the Russians Came to the County." Anne Arundel County History Notes 29 (October 1997): 1-2.

Lesher, Pete. "Eastern Shore Summers: Waterfront Guest Houses and Hotels in the Age of Steam." Weather Gauge 35 (Fall 1999): 18-23.

McGowan, Lynn. "A Survey of Irish Usage among Immigrants in the United States." In The Irish Language in the United States: A Historical, Sociolinguistic, and Applied Linguistic Study, edited by Thomas W. Ihde. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994, 67-76.
Notes: To evaluate the persistence of Irish language usage by Irish immigrants to the United States in the period following 1922, McGowan conducted a limited survey of respondents in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. In order to determine the impact of Irish language instruction fostered by the Free State of Ireland, she selected only those who had been educated in Irish primary schools after the implementation of the language policy. She found that for most immigrants to the United States, Irish had remained a "school language," not used a great deal in everyday life, though there were important degrees of persistence in reading, writing, and conversation.

Mills, Eric. Chesapeake Rumrunners of the Roaring Twenties. Centreville, MD: Tidewater Publishers, 2000.

Orser, Edward, and Joseph Arnold. Catonsville, 1880-1940: From Village to Suburb. Norfolk, VA: Donning Pubishing Co., 1989.
Notes: This photographic history traces the history of Catonsville, on Baltimore County's west side, from the 1880s, when the village center served the needs of travelers on Frederick Road and the surrounding agricultural area, as well as afforded sites for summer homes for some of Baltimore's elite, to 1940, when growth, development, and transportation links heightened its suburban character within the Baltimore metropolitan region. The volume includes research evidence on the social make-up of the community, such as the impact of German and Irish immigrants and the role of its historic African American community.

Potter, Lillian Howard. "Political Cooperation, Economic Competition: Relationships Between Jewish and Black Communities in Baltimore, Maryland, 1930-1940." Maryland Humanities (Winter 1998): 7.

Sandler, Gilbert. Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press in association with the Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2000.

Sandler, Gilbert. The Neighborhood: The Story of Baltimore's Little Italy. Baltimore, MD: Bodine and Associates, 1974.

Tulkoff, Alec S. "Counterfeiting the Holocaust." Generations (Fall 1993): 20-22.

Valliant, Joseph N., Jr. "Memories of Terrapin'in." Weather Gauge 35 (Spring 1999): 12-15, 25.

Warner, William W. Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1976.
Notes: Naturalist writer Warner examines the Chesapeake Bay's blue crab-the "beautiful swimmer"--and the watermen whose distinctive economy and life-style have been based upon it. Warner uses the cycle of the seasons to trace the complex relationship between natural environment and human community, with attention both to the social patterns and economics of water-related societies. Traditional watermen communities of the Chesapeake Bay region receiving considerable attention are Deal Island, Smith Island, Kent Island, and Crisfield in Maryland, and Tangier Island in Virginia.

Wood, Gregory A. A Guide to the Acadians in Maryland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1995.

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