Photographer Jay Fleming turned his attention to Smith and Tangier Islands - the Chesapeake Bay's last inhabited 'water-locked' islands. Fleming has made countless trips to the islands to document the unique way of life and environment that have been shaped by isolation and the waters of the Chesapeake. This collection of photographs will fill the pages of Fleming's second book, Island Life. This body work comes at an important time for the islands, as their populations continue to decline and the unrelenting forces of the bay threaten the working working waterfronts that have sustained the communities for centuries. Fleming hopes that his photography will immerse readers in the Island Life and capture a crucial moment in time for the Chesapeake's most unique communities.

"Tangier is a mere dot of land in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay situated just below the Maryland-Virginia line. This study is an account of the Islanders' beginnings in the late 1700s, a portrait of them as an isolated community under siege, and a description of the way they talk."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

An appendix documents the many small islands that have dropped entirely from view since the seventeenth century.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The Literary House Press at Washington College publishes a range of general interest books and scholarly monographs. Its publications present literary, scientific, historic, journalistic, environmental, and public policy writings of the Chesapeake Bay region. As publisher for Washington College, the press also publishes scholarly monographs written by faculty or taken from lecture series at the college. In addition, Literary House Press publishes works of literary merit without regard to subject or setting. Through the voice of their mother, the author of this enchanting memoir, the Jander family speaks to us across half-a-century about a world that is no more. Running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity were little more than dreams when the Jander family settled on tiny Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. To leave the pressures of urban life behind, the Janders moved to the island during World War II and remained there as the children grew up and departed. Anne Jander began her memoir in 1943 and completed it in 1952. She died ten years later, and her family decided, after another thirty years, to seek its publication.

The inspiring story behind the national anthem and the American flag comes alive in this “page-turning narrative [with] generous archival illustrations” (Kirkus, starred review). “O say can you see” begins one of the most recognizable songs in the US. Originally a poem by Francis Scott Key, the national anthem tells the story of the American flag rising high above a fort after a night of intense battle during the War of 1812. But there is much more to the story than what is sung at ball games. What was this battle about? Whose bombs were bursting, and why were rockets glaring? Who sewed those broad stripes and bright stars? Why were free black soldiers fighting on both sides? Who was Francis Scott Key anyway, and how did he have such a close view? An illustrated history for young readers, Star-Spangled tells the whole story from the perspectives of different key figures—both American and British—of this obscure but important battle. The book includes an author’s note, a timeline, a glossary, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index. A Kirkus Best Book of 2020

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A darkly incantatory tragicomedy of love and betrayal ... Beautifully paced, emotionally wise.” —The Boston Globe In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen—Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs—sit at night, none too patiently. The pair are trying to locate Maurice’s estranged daughter, Dilly, whom they’ve heard is either arriving on a boat coming from Tangier or departing on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles. Rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today, Night Boat to Tangier is a superbly melancholic melody of a novel, full of beautiful phrases and terrible men.

Go where the story is--that's one tenet of journalism Earl Swift has had little trouble living up to. In two decades of covering the commonwealth, Swift has hiked, canoed--even spelunked--a singular path through Virginia. He has also stopped and listened. This collection brings together some twenty Virginia tales wherein hardship is revealed as tragedy, and humor appears as uncanny, illuminating strangeness. The Pulitzer-nominated title story takes us to the Chesapeake island of Tangier, home to a Methodist enclave over two hundred years old, with an economy almost wholly dependent on the blue crab. The gradual exodus of the island's young people and the dwindling crab hauls point to an inevitable extinction that finds a dramatic metaphor in the erosion of the island itself, which is literally disappearing beneath its inhabitants' feet. An epic piece of reporting, "When the Rain Came" revisits the August night in 1969 when Hurricane Camille descended on Nelson and Rockbridge counties, bringing with it a deluge of nearly Biblical proportions that killed 151 people. It was later characterized by the Department of the Interior as "one of the all-time meteorological anomalies in the United States." Swift looks beyond the extraordinary numbers to find the individual stories, told to him by the people who still remember the trembling floorboards and rain too heavy to see, or even breathe, through. Other stories include a nerve-wracking inside look at the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11, the travails of a failed novelist turned folk-art demigod, an account of a 1929 Scott County tornado (deemed the deadliest in Virginia history), and a profile of Nelson County swami Master Charles, who boasts a corps of meditative followers, a mountain retreat in Nellysford, and an incomplete resume. Each piece reconfirms Virginia as a land uncommonly rich in stories--and Earl Swift as one of its most perceptive and tireless chroniclers.

From its beginnings as a trickle of icy water in Virginia's northwest corner to its miles-wide mouth at Hampton Roads, the James River has witnessed more recorded history than any other feature of the American landscape -- as home to the continent's first successful English settlement, highway for Native Americans and early colonists, battleground in the Revolution and the Civil War, and birthplace of America's twentieth-century navy. In 1998, restless in his job as a reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift landed an assignment traveling the entire length of the James. He hadn't been in a canoe since his days as a Boy Scout, and he knew that the river boasts whitewater, not to mention man-made obstacles, to challenge even experienced paddlers. But reinforced by Pilot photographer Ian Martin and a lot of freeze-dried food and beer, Swift set out to immerse himself -- he hoped not literally -- in the river and its history. What Swift survived to bring us is this engrossing chronicle of three weeks in a fourteen-foot plastic canoe and four hundred years in the life of Virginia. Fueled by humor and a dauntless curiosity about the land, buildings, and people on the banks, and anchored by his sidekick Martin -- whose photographs accompany the text -- Swift points his bow through the ghosts of a frontier past, past Confederate forts and POW camps, antebellum mills, ruined canals, vanished towns, and effluent-spewing industry. Along the banks, lonely meadowlands alternate with suburbs and power plants, marinas and the gleaming skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. Enduring dunkings, wolf spiders, near-arrest, channel fever, and twenty-knot winds, Swift makes it to the Chesapeake Bay. Readers who accompany him through his Journey on the James will come away with the accumulated pleasure, if not the bruises and mud, of four hundred miles of adventure and history in the life of one of America's great watersheds.