19th century

Text and photographs from a living history village in West Virginia recreate the pioneer life of young people in Appalachia in the early nineteenth century.

Lemuel Chenoweth is a shy western Virginia furniture maker with only a third-grade education and a vision when he heads to Richmond, Virginia, to enter a bridge-designing contest. Lemuel stuns the judges and the highfalutin' competition by assembling an extraordinary bridge model-one that can support his own weight-and he wins. Built entirely without nails, his bridge became one of the most famous in the country and was the site of the first land battle of the Civil War.
From the publisher's description.

"...chronicles four centuries of public attitudes about the Bay - and legislative responses to them - from 1607, the date of the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, to the close of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, wide-reaching measures by federal and local governments have influenced how people use the Bay: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency completed a massive study of Bay quality; the Chesapeake Bay Program was launched; the Critical Area Protection Act went into effect."
(From the publisher's description)

"Here is a dazzling array of swashbuckling pirates, picaroons, and sea rovers pitted against the often feckless representatives of an outpost government authority in the Chesapeake Bay region. It is an exciting and dramatic 200-year history that begins grimly with the "starving time" in the Virginia colony in 1609 and ends with the peaceful resolution of the Othello affair with the French in 1807. In between lies a full panoply of violent and bizarre buccaneering incidents that one is hard pressed to imagine."
(From the publisher's description)

In the decades following the Civil War, Chesapeake Bay became the scene of a life and death struggle to harvest the oyster, one of the most valuable commodi­ties on the Atlantic coast. In this book, noted historian and author John Wennersten tells the stories of wa­termen, law enforcement officers, government officials, Bay scientists, immi­grants, and oyster shuckers involved in the oyster trade.
(From the publisher's description)