A moving, fictionalized account of a march that raised awareness about child labor. Eight-year-old Aidan and his friend Gussie have joined the picket line at the cotton mill to demand the chance to go to school instead of work. But when famous labor reformer Mother Jones arrives, she has an even bolder idea than a strike. She wants to lead them on a march from Pennsylvania all the way to President Theodore Rooseveltês summer home in Oyster Bay, New York! This inspiring tale is a tribute to the extraordinary spirit of Mother Jones, and a testament to the power of standing up for whatês right, no matter how old you are.

They say falling in love is easy. But what if you know it'll break your heart? For Emily Tate, returning to her charming childhood home Oyster Bay is like coming up for air after the fast pace of her city life. At the farm her grandfather built, surrounded by sister Rachel's chatter, Gram's buttermilk biscuits, and the soft, white sand, Emily is reminded of exactly who she is and what she holds most dear. When Emily starts work at elegant Water's Edge Inn, Charles Peterson, the handsome new owner, asks for her help. He wants to expand and needs Emily to teach him the local ways, so he can convince the planning commission. Emily vows to make him fall in love with her hometown, just the way it is. At work, Charles is reserved and serious, yet once Emily has him kicking off his shoes in the sand and sailing across the glistening Chesapeake Bay, she sees another side to him, and their easy rapport feels like the start of something big. But when it becomes clear Charles's plans for the inn involve bulldozing Oyster Bay, Emily is heartbroken. Will she lose her home and Charles all at once, or can she save Oyster Bay, and give true love a chance? "Summer at Oyster Bay" is the perfect, feel-good summer romance, about the importance of home and family, learning what love is, and living in the here and now.

In his stunning debut of stories, Jules S. Damji explores the social ethos of an immigrant Asian community set in the early 1960s through to the 1970s, a decade of immense political changes that marked many peoples lives in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Starting with Mango Tree, a metaphor of stability which embodies a center around which a community revolves, only to be seen destroyed and a way of life lost; Caretaker tenderly reveals the hidden and wretched historical past of a man dedicated to service his community; the nefarious characters in Middlemen are a poignant reminder of human flaws: graft, greed, manipulation, lust, and power; family relationships in Marxist and His Sister and A Household Divided wickedly and woefully capture the predicament universally endured by so many when an ideology is embraced to the point of fault; Oyster Bay and Freedom Fighter is a cry for breaking away and a genesis of a writer; and ending with Family Reunion, a glimpse into the narrators desire to illuminate his fading past. Sometimes with strokes of simple and lucid prose that tugs your heart, other times with cool detachment and assured maturity that bucks your sensibility, Mr. Damji masterfully chronicles a slice of history through the tragically comic fictional characters set in Dar es Salaams residential district of Upanga, a setting intimately familiar to him.

A gravestone, a mention in local archives, stories still handed down around Oyster Bay: the outline of a woman begins to emerge and with her the world she inhabited, so rich in tradition and shaken by violent change. Katie Kettle Gale was born into a Salish community in Puget Sound in the 1850s, just as settlers were migrating into what would become Washington State. With her people forced out of their traditional hunting and fishing grounds into ill-provisioned island camps and reservations, Katie Gale sought her fortune in Oyster Bay. In that early outpost of multiculturalism--where Native Americans and immigrants from the eastern United States, Europe, and Asia vied for economic, social, political, and legal power--a woman like Gale could make her way. As LLyn De Danaan mines the historical record, we begin to see Gale, a strong-willed Native woman who cofounded a successful oyster business, then won the legal rights from her Euro-American husband, a man with whom she had raised children but who ultimately made her life unbearable. Steeped in sadness--with a lost home and a broken marriage, children dying in their teens, and tuberculosis claiming her at forty-three--Katie Gale's story is also one of remarkable pluck, a tale of hard work and ingenuity, gritty initiative and bad luck that is, ultimately, essentially American.

In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry. Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin. But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level. The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

Settled by the Dutch and English in the mid-17th century, the small hamlet of Oyster Bay has a rich history and retains much of its charm and character. Theodore Roosevelt purchased land at Oyster Bay in 1880 on which he built his home, Sagamore Hill. Oyster Bay became the focus of national attention from 1902 through 1908, when Roosevelt brought the executive branch of the government to Oyster Bay each summer. Many other wealthy New York City families built summer homes at Oyster Bay in the late 19th century, forming the nucleus of what became the gold coast setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Louis Comfort Tiffany built his 110-room mansion at Oyster Bay, and "Typhoid Mary" Mallon was identified while working as a cook in the hamlet.

A young oyster who loves his life in the Chesapeake Bay seeks a way to join other creatures in the important work of keeping their bay clean.