Chesapeake Bay

It's not exactly field guide-sized, but IS "an illustrated guide to fishes, invertebrates, and plants of bays and inlets from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras." It also discusses the natural history of the organisms. Yay!

This book used to be subtitled "Invertebrates and Seaweeds of the Atlantic Coast from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Hatteras." It helped me identify comb jellies and a few other weird beasties near Chesapeake Bay.

What was it like when Britain ruled the waves, but pirates haunted the coasts of colonial America? In this maritime history, Rediker examines a dangerous, adventurous brotherhood of the sea.

This book reports on the work of forensic scientists who are excavating grave sites in James Fort, in Jamestown, Virginia, to understand the people who lived in the Chesapeake Bay area in the 1600s and 1700s.

Often compared unfavorably with colonial New England, the early Chesapeake has been portrayed as irreligious, unstable, and violent. In this important new study, James Horn challenges this conventional view and looks across the Atlantic to assess the enduring influence of English attitudes, values, and behavior on the social and cultural evolution of the early Chesapeake.
(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)

Focusing on the Chesapeake Bay area, Mills (a journalist and historian associated with the U.S. Naval Institute) depicts those on both sides of the law during prohibition--bootleggers, still-operators, and mobsters, as well as the police, federal agents, Coast Guardsmen, and temperance crusaders. His account draws from local lore, with the backing of newspaper reports and government documents.
(From the publisher's description)