The Baltimore Steam Packet Company, now familiarly knows as the Old Bay Line, has for a century run steamers up and down the Chesapeake Bay.

Long the main resource on this key American river, this book’s expanded second edition includes dozens of new photos and maps, updates, and six new chapters recording the twenty-first century’s most recent developments on the Patapsco River. Along with insightful narration of its impact on its watershed and on Baltimore in particular, the book contains the entire recorded history of the Patapsco River. It moves from the early Native American camps on its shores, through the late twentieth-century revitalization of its harbor, and to the environmental and economic changes the Patapsco has been a part of during these first decades of the twenty-first century. The Patapsco’s story contains some of the most important and fascinating events of Maryland’s past, and this book allows the reader to dip at will into the exciting and unexpected blend of people, places, and events that have had such great impact on the state of Maryland and the nation.

This environmental history of America’s largest estuary provides insight into how and why its former productivity and abundant fisheries have declined. The concept of “shifting baselines”—changes in historical reference points used in environmental assessments—illuminates a foundational challenge when evaluating the health of ecosystems and seeking to restore degraded wildlife populations. In this important book, Victor S. Kennedy examines the problem of shifting baselines for one of the most productive aquatic resources in the world: the Chesapeake Bay. Kennedy explains that since the 1800s, when the Bay area was celebrated for its aquatic bounty, harvest baselines have shifted downward precipitously. Over the centuries, fishers and hunters, supported by an extensive infrastructure of boats, gear, and processing facilities, overexploited the region’s fish, crustaceans, terrapin, and waterfowl, squandering a profound resource. Beginning with the colonial period and continuing through the twentieth century, Kennedy gathers an unparalleled collection of scientific resources and eyewitness reports by colonists, fishers, managers, scientists, and newspaper reporters to create a comprehensive examination of the Chesapeake’s environmental history. Focusing on the relative productivity and health of its fisheries and wildlife and highlighting key species such as shad, oysters, and blue crab, Shifting Baselines in the Chesapeake Bay helps readers understand the remarkable extent of the Bay’s natural resources in the past so that we can begin to understand what has changed since, and why. Such knowledge can help illustrate the Bay’s potential fertility and stimulate efforts to restore this pivotal maritime system’s ecological health and productivity.

The major part of this work is an alphabetically arranged and cross-indexed list of some 20,000 Maryland families with references to the sources and locations of the records in which they appear. In addition, there is a research record guide arranged by county and type of record, and it identifies all genealogical manuscripts, books, and articles known to exist up to 1940, when this book was first published. Included are church and county courthouse records, deeds, marriages, rent rolls, wills, land records, tombstone inscriptions, censuses, directories, and other data sources.

This is the story of a ship and her pioneer master, Moses Rogers, who had the idea of making the first transatlantic voyage in a steam-propelled vessel. His "laudable and meritorious experiment" marked one of the world's maritime epochs. The conception and building of the S. S. Savannah was guided by the engineering genius of Captain Rogers who, with Robert Fulton, was a leading exponent of steam in his day. The momentous voyage began in Savannah, Georgia, in 1819, and took the courageous crew to England, Sweden, and Russia. These were the elegant steam ship's times of triumph. Yet she also had moments of pathos, from the first doubts and fears of a public that dubbed her a "steam coffin" to that sad day when a Washington newspaper said her engine could be removed for only $200, leaving her "just as good" as any other ship. The previously untold story of the first steam-powered vessel to cross the Atlantic is written in a scholarly, well-documented fashion, yet with the color, imagination, and humor of the men who lived it.

Excerpt from Steam Packets on the Chesapeake: A History of the Old Bay Line Since 1840 One of the Observances of the Centennial was the publication of a book of limited distribution tracing the company's story from its inception down to the centennial year. This work, printed by the Dietz Press of Richmond, Virginia, was issued under the joint auspices of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company and of The Mariners Museum in Newport News, Virginia, of which I was then Corresponding Secretary. Since 1940, however, the Old Bay Line and the Nation at large have passed through another World War deeply affecting the destinies of all. So much has happened to men and ships in the interim, that it was logically decided a new edition of the book, brought up to date with additional chapters covering these more recent events, would prove a useful contribution to the literature of the sea. In revising and enlarging the text, the author was given, as on the initial occasion, the unstinted help and encouragement of the Company and, particularly so, from two officials who by now are to be considered old friends, Bob Dunn, president of the Line, and Ray Jones, passenger traffic manager. The following passages, excerpts taken from the preface of the first edition of The Old Bay Line: 1840-1940, are still applicable to this revised work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Despite all that has been written about the April 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the story of John Surratt—the only conspirator who got away—remains untold and largely unknown. The capture and shooting of John Wilkes Booth twelve days after he shot Lincoln is a well-known and well-covered story. The fate of the eight other accomplices of Booth has also been widely written about. Four, including Surratt’s mother, Mary, were convicted and hanged, and four were jailed. John Surratt alone managed to evade capture for twenty months and escape punishment once he was put on trial. In this tale of adventure and mystery, Andrew Jampoler tells what happened to that last conspirator, who after Booth’s death became the most wanted man in America.