The culmination of Christopher Tilghman's great Chesapeake saga, a story spanning four centuries of an American family. It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering at their historic Chesapeake farm, Mason’s Retreat. It isn’t everyone’s favorite party, but Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into hosting a celebratory dinner. Their oldest, Rosalie, is having trouble with her marriage; the youngest, Ethan, is in the throes of a fitful first relationship. In between, Eleanor despairs over her stalled novel, a fictionalized memoir of the wife of the first Mason settler who landed there in 1659. Kate, recovering from a second round of chemotherapy, is at the center of this ritual of remembrance. Tart and candid, she asks her husband, “What crime against humanity did your family not commit on that land?” And so it is more or less inevitable that when the clan, joined by a cast of neighbors and cousins from France, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should think and feel about their past comes to the fore. Told with irony and deep insight, On the Tobacco Coast is Christopher Tilghman’s concluding meditation on the themes of his novels about this ancestral monument: the pride and shame in its long history, the persistence of family stories, race and privilege, the enigmas and customs of regions. It is a reflects on the state of America today, with its battles with its own history and efforts to reckon with the wrongs of the past while looking forward to an uncertain, more just future.

A masterful novel that confronts the dilemmas of race, family, and forbidden love in the wake of America's Civil War Fifteen years after the publication of his acclaimed novel Mason's Retreat, Christopher Tilghman returns to the Mason family and the Chesapeake Bay in The Right-Hand Shore. It is 1920, and Edward Mason is making a call upon Miss Mary Bayly, the current owner of the legendary Mason family estate, the Retreat. Miss Mary is dying. She plans to give the Retreat to the closest direct descendant of the original immigrant owner that she can find. Edward believes he can charm the old lady, secure the estate and be back in Baltimore by lunchtime. Instead, over the course of a long day, he hears the stories that will forever bind him and his family to the land. He hears of Miss Mary's grandfather brutally selling all his slaves in 1857 in order to avoid the reprisals he believes will come with Emancipation. He hears of the doomed efforts by Wyatt Bayly, Miss Mary's father, to turn the Retreat into a vast peach orchard, and of Miss Mary and her brother growing up in a fractured and warring household. He learns of Abel Terrell, son of free blacks who becomes head orchardist, and whose family becomes intimately connected to the Baylys and to the Mason legacy. The drama in this richly textured novel proceeds through vivid set pieces: on rural nineteenth-century industry; on a boyhood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; on the unbreakable divisions of race and class; and, finally, on two families attempting to save a son and a daughter from the dangers of their own innocent love. The result is a radiant work of deep insight and peerless imagination about the central dilemma of American history. The Right-Hand Shore is a New York Times Notable Book of 2012.

This volume presents the most recent archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research that challenges simplistic perceptions of Native smoking and explores a wide variety of questions regarding smoking plants and pipe forms from throughout North America and parts of South America. By broadening research questions, utilizing new analytical methods, and applying interdisciplinary interpretative frameworks, this volume offers new insights into a diverse array of perspectives on smoke plants and pipes.

« Because of the ceremonial and ritual aspects of the practice in Native American societies, smoking pipes are important cultural artifacts. The essays in Smoking and Culture constitute the first sustained inerpretive study of smoking pipes, focusing on the cultural significance of smoking both before and after European contact. »--Résumé de l'éditeur.

The great Tidewater planters of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were fathers of the American Revolution. Perhaps first and foremost, they were also anxious tobacco farmers, harried by a demanding planting cycle, trans-Atlantic shipping risks, and their uneasy relations with English agents. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries lived in a world that was dominated by questions of debt from across an ocean but also one that stressed personal autonomy. T. H. Breen's study of this tobacco culture focuses on how elite planters gave meaning to existence. He examines the value-laden relationships--found in both the fields and marketplaces--that led from tobacco to politics, from agrarian experience to political protest, and finally to a break with the political and economic system that they believed threatened both personal independence and honor.

Tobacco addresses the many interrelated controversies surrounding the historical and current use of tobacco and presents a clear, objective, and thorough treatment of this contentious public health and legal issue. The American Indians valued tobacco as a wonder drug. When Rodrigo de Jerez, who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his maiden voyage of 1492, returned to Spain with tobacco, he was accused of associating with Satan and imprisoned when his compatriots saw smoke coming out of his nose. This book covers everything from the history of tobacco to health and social issues such as targeting children. Biographical sketches of key personalities associated with tobacco range from Thomas Edison, who refused to hire anybody who smoked cigarettes, to Jean Nicot, the French Ambassador to Portugal in the mid-1500s, from whose name the word nicotine is derived. This title takes the reader through the myriad of issues that make up the tobacco debate in a clear and unbiased way.

This pamphlet has been compiled to fill a need for a brief but comprehensive description of the various phases of the tobacco industry. It is designed mainly for use of persons whose frequent requests indicate an interest in such overall type of information. The publication contains a minimum of statistics. For current statistical information, reference should be made to the latest edition of the Annual Report on Tobacco Statistics, published by the Consumer and Marketing Service, and the Tobacco Situation, published by the Economic Research Service.