Maryland Books

Having grown up on the Patapsco River, fishing and crabbing it's lower waters in the summertime and ice skating it's upper reaches in the winter, I bought this book and looked forward to a wonderful history.

What I found was a series of (at best) essay's containing basically the same information over and over again disquised as chapters.

Each essay (read "Chapter") was a jumble of timelines that took you through the late 1600's through the early 1900's containing stories of the same events, places and characters or their siblings in different order.

I perseverved through 3/4's of this tomb on my beloved River and finally left it lying in rapt disappointment. I perfer to remember it's History as told by my father and his and remember my experiences during it's worst era (mid 20th century) through it's struggle to become reborn today.

If you are considering this book, I recommend you take the drive through Patapsco State Park along the "Old River" on Sunday instead.

I got interested in the Patapsco River when I went to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I knew about the general history of the B & O railroad in the Patapsco Valley, but this book opened up an entire new window on the history of the Patapsco Valley. Travers' prose makes the history of the Patapsco Valley easily accessible to everyone and the geographic organization of his book makes it useful as a guidebook too.

I have had the previous version of this guide for quite a few years and found it fairly useful. Most of the locations are pretty well known and a lot of the information is sorely outdated. For example, the author lists contact information for a local artist, along with an address for visitors. I live next door to the house in question and the artist has long since moved on to a managed care facility and the home is definitely not a museum that welcomes visitors any more. This kind of error makes me hesitant to seek out some of the other, lesser known, locations that are listed.

There are a few things wrong with this book and title. First, a two hundred page book on Maryland and Delaware only has 29 pages on Delaware. There are 32 pages on Greater Washington (like there is much off the beaten path here). Next is some of the Off the Beaten Path palces covered are such unheard of places as - BWI Airport, US Naval Academy, Camden Yards, Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Delaware Art Museum and Dover Air Force Base. That last one is where you can see the C5A cargo planes that according to the book each plane "is big enough to hold several football fields". Now that is a unique plane!
Much of this book seems little more then the author collected those flyiers from the card racks found at most hotels. While there are some unique places in the book most of it is little more than press release quotes from the local Chambers of Commerce. It is not "A Guide to Unique Places" that it claims to be.

I bought this book becouse I am not a american, and I wanted to read and learn a little bit of the american holidays and special days. They take up a lot of different hollidays in this book, but they do not get in the deepth. I wich they would write in the beginning wich days are the biggest and that most american are celebrate, and on wich ones the americans are off from work, but they do not, so it is confusing! And I would also wich for a nicer look on the book with lot of nice collored pictures, in this one there are only black and white ones, not fun at all!!

I would recomend you to bye a diffrent book!

At the conclusion of his monograph of why white working-class Baltimoreans abandoned the party of the New Deal, Kenneth Durr comments "We should neither vilify the lawmakers, philosophers, and clergy who helped bring about social change nor the white working people who had the furthest to go in adjusting to it." Fair enough one would think, but this is just a last disingenuous comment on a book that has been consistently evasive. For throughout his book Durr has continually damned liberals as intellectual elitists who ignore the wisdom of the (white) common people. Building on the work of such persons as Jonathan Rieder, Thomas Edsall and Jim Sleeper, Durr argues that problems developed in the fifties over white resistance to integration. Although angry working class whites used a racist vocabulary and were often admittedly racist, Durr argues that they had real concerns over blockbusting that elitist liberals didn't deal with. As the sixties and seventies wore on, working-class whites became increasingly and justifiably annoyed over liberal perfidy over school prayer, crime, the Vietnam War, student unrest and affirmative action. They had moved beyond racism, but elitist liberals were too cowardly to recognize their legitimate concerns. What's wrong with this picture? A comparison with Thomas Sugrue's Bancroft Prize winning "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" reveals no shortage of problems. For a start, although Durr lists nearly two pages of archival sources, his work relies less on what working-class whites said than what they are quoted in major newspapers. Similarly, all of his working-class white subjects tend to sound alike, tend to think alike and tend to sound like Durr. This is in striking contrast to Sugure. Added to this is the fact that Durr often refers to "Baltimoreans" and "blue collar Baltimoreans," when he is clearly referring to whites only. Most striking of all this is a story about racial conflict in which we only really hear one side of the story. Durr admits that there was often discrimination against blacks, but he does not go nearly into the extent or depth that Sugrue did. On questions such as education or housing Durr looks only at the sacrifices working-class whites have to make and pays no real attention to the gross injustices black Baltimoreans had to face.

This leads to the whole question of racism. It is all well and good to say that there was more to white protest than racism, but that is not the same as saying that white protest was just, reasonable or in good faith. Durr argues that whites were legitimately concerned about blockbusting and property values. But he concedes that they did not protest realtors or demand reform of the housing market. Instead they protested when black students entered schools or swimming pools or dancehalls. Durr quotes, and apparently agrees with, those Baltimoreans who thought that there was no moral difference between common criminals and people who used civil disobedience against segregated parks. Anti-war protestors break a few windows in Baltimore and Durr's subjects are appalled. Millions of people die in a pointless, unjust war, but their sensitivities don't matter. Of course Durr's story of urban decline does not include such factors as selfish urban machines or gross favoritism for the suburbs, which encouraged crime, poverty and a fiscal crisis that would be difficult for anyone to solve. It also does not include pollution, Republican campaigns against unions or redistribution of income to the very wealthiest. Johnson's Great Society programs and its many "middle-class" beneficiaries get only a grudging mention here. But let us suppose that Durr is right and that support for Wallace and Agnew did not reflect racist malevolence towards blacks. What then was the blue-collar white attitude towards African-Americans who, by the end of Durr's study, make up the majority of Baltimore? We don't know. Two to three centuries of malice just vanishes, and beyond that Durr fears to tread. What alternative did the community organizations offer to blockbusting, aside from trying to prevent blacks from moving? We don't know that either. Durr makes much of the unfairness of working class whites having to bear the brunt of integrating schools which suburban whites could escape from, but they hardly proposed county-wide integration or proposals to improve black schools. He speaks vaguely of some sort of "separate but equal" alliance between working class blacks and whites might have been possible had it not been, once again, elitist liberals, but he doesn't develop the point. Hardly surprising, really, since if whites do not wish blacks to live near them, work with them, sleep with them or go to the same schools, it is not likely that they will unite to the mutual benefit of both. Durr makes much of blue collar "realism" as opposed to the "abstractions" of liberal intellectuals, but he repeats their claims about welfare and dirty black quarters without any real analysis of whether that is true, or why. Durr prides his subjects for their sense of moral seriousness, yet this is a book where the most profound moral questions are evaded or the subject changed or other people blamed. As even Durr admits himself this is a working class political tradition that is often useless or ineffective or quietist when not directed about blacks. And starting with Jew-baiting against the CIO in the forties, Joe McCarthy's infamous doctored photograph against Senator Tydings, or enthusiasm for venial, shabby, dishonest people like George Wallace and Spiro Agnew, it is not a tradition known for its fine judge of character. The only way Durr can encourage our sympathy for this fundamentally demagogic practice is to adapt much of it himself.

The book jacket description listed here is misleading. This book sheds very little light on any of the individual Maryland families mentioned in the title. Its focus is on wealthy colonists as a class with little emphasis on the individual families. Furthermore, it is not really a study of the 'Maryland' elite as the title says, because it primarily limits itself to only two counties in Maryland. The book might be interesting to historical sociologists but I doubt that anyone wishing to learn details of old Maryland families would be satisfied with this purchase.

Despite the title, "daytrips and getaway weekends," this reads like a poorly organized standard travel guide. Most "itineraries" contain at least a weeks' worth of activities (would anyone consider "New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson River Valley" to be a manageable daytrip, or even weekend trip?). Some itineraries list literally hundreds of different sites and activities, while others would entail 24 hours of driving (this is not what I think of when I think "daytrip"!).

My 2nd gripe is that half the book is devoted to New York. Pennsylvania gets a big chunk of the rest, while coverage of Maryland, Virginia, DC, etc. is thin.

Finally, the maps are completely inadequate.

At the outset Lightfoot states that this book is intended for the "interested layman." As such it is a decent book with some theory, some data and a good deal of scientific philosophy, or maybe the history of science. However to any reader who may have a backround in such subjects the book seems to be a dangerous gloss of important points. It should also be stated at the outset that Lightfoot is not ashamed to put forth his own ideas on these subjects in which he may, or may not be an expert. At times this tendency is obnoxious, and occasionaly, most often in his chapter conclusions, he states his case honestly and makes it clear that there are some things which he may be mistaken in. As for his final conclusions(the last three chapters) there are a few good points, a paragraph here and there which deomonstrate either Lightfoot's knowledge of his own limitations or at least intelectual honesty. Unfortunately, for the most part these chapters are misleading, rehtorical and uninformed.

This book contains many errors regarding family genealogies. Families with similar names have been confused and names are misspelled. Family information has not been properly researched, proofread, or edited.

What a great concept- a state photo book with the option of a personalized cover. The best gift idea I've heard of in a long time. However, IDEAS often fail in their execution...

The book is of good quality itself but I was astonished at the quality of the photographs- many lacked in the quality of subject composition, some were blurry or had a bad tint, and the vast majority were simply boring. Considering that this was a largely a digital project I was very surprised. I am not a professional photographer, yet I could scrape up enough of my good shots to publish a much prettier version of Maryland. I would say about 5 photos out of the book are actually worth holding onto. Most of the photos feature people as subjects, which would have worked well if the photojournalism was better.

I do have to commend the company however on it's turn-around time on the personalized covers. I put the order in within 2 weeks of the Christmas holiday and I received it two days before the holiday. I checked the kindly provdided status link frequently and I was amazed that the job was completed within just 3 days! Although, I did end up waiting almost two weeks on pins and needles because although they claimed to send it via USPS priority mail shipping, they sent it parcel post instead.

My opinion would be to look through the book at your local store and see if you like the photos before you put your name on the front cover and personalize it. Me? I would save my money and have a photo calendar made at the local drugstore.

I thought this book:'Prince George's County Maryland', by Corpening Rowe et al would have focused more on the history of PG County. Instead it concentrated mainly, on the lives of some of the earlier families from PG and their decendents through pictures. I didn't find it useful as a historical reference book. I wanted to read something on the demographics of the county which would explain how Black people became the successful affluent majority, but would also mention other racial groups who live there too.

Lisette Felix
March 2008