The Delaware Naturalist Handbook

The Delaware Naturalist Handbook is the primary public face of a major university-led public educational outreach and community engagement initiative. This statewide master naturalist certification program is designed to train hundreds of citizen scientists, K–12 environmental educators, ecological restoration volunteers, and habitat managers each year. The initiative is conducted in collaboration with multiple disciplines at the University of Delaware, the University of Delaware Cooperative Extension, the Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN), the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (DNREC), the state Division of Parks, the state Forest Service, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife, and local nonprofit educational institutions, including the Mount Cuba Center, the Delaware Nature Society and Ashland Nature Center, Delaware Wildlands, Northeast Climate Hub, Center for Inland Bays, and White Clay Creek State Park.

Votes for Delaware Women is the first book-length study of the woman suffrage struggle in Delaware, placing it within the rich historical scholarship of the national story. It looks especially at why, despite decades of suffrage organizing and an epic struggle in Dover, in the spring of 1920, the legislature refused to make Delaware the final state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. The book traces how, starting in the 1890s, white and African American women organized and advocated for "votes for women," first by revising the state constitution and then through a federal amendment. Within the state's two major suffrage organizations, the Delaware Equal Suffrage Association (DESA), an affiliate of the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and the Delaware branch of the National Woman's Party (NWP), divisions over strategy and tactics widened into fissures, especially during the Great War, making it difficult to unite in a common endeavor. Delaware was unusual as a border state that was segregated but did not disfranchise African Americans. In the end, the book argues, a combination of racial and class issues doomed the ratification effort.

Victorine Elizabeth du Pont, the first child of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and his wife Sophie, was seven years old when her family emigrated to America, where her father established the humble beginnings of what would become a corporate giant. Through correspondence with friends and relatives from the ages of eight to sixty-eight, Victorine unwittingly chronicled the first sixty years of the du Pont saga in America. As she recovered from personal tragedy, she became first tutor of her siblings and relations. This biography makes the case that Victorine has had the broadest—and most enduring—influence within the entire du Pont family of any family member. The intellectual heir of her venerable grandfather, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, although Victorine grew up in an age where women's opportunities were limited, her pioneering efforts in education, medicine, and religion transformed an entire millworkers’ community.

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor. The WPA Guide to Delaware takes the reader on a journey through the coastal beauty of the state, from the Twelve-Mile Circle to the Nanticoke River. Although Delaware is the second smallest state in terms of area, the guide offers 27 driving tours accompanied by engaging photographs and pen-and-ink drawings. Published in 1938, this guide to the First State, also details Delaware’s rich history.

Americans often think of New Jersey as an environmental nightmare. As seen from its infamous turnpike, which is how many travelers experience the Garden State, it is difficult not to be troubled by the wealth of industrial plants, belching smokestacks, and hills upon hills of landfills. Yet those living and working in New Jersey often experience a very different environment. Despite its dense population and urban growth, two-thirds of the state remains covered in farmland and forest, and New Jersey has a larger percentage of land dedicated to state parks and forestland than the average for all states. It is this ecological paradox that makes New Jersey important for understanding the relationship between Americans and their natural world. In New Jersey’s Environments, historians, policy-makers, and earth scientists use a case study approach to uncover the causes and consequences of decisions regarding land use, resources, and conservation. Nine essays consider topics ranging from solid waste and wildlife management to the effects of sprawl on natural disaster preparedness. The state is astonishingly diverse and faces more than the usual competing interests from environmentalists, citizens, and businesses. This book documents the innovations and compromises created on behalf of and in response to growing environmental concerns in New Jersey, all of which set examples on the local level for nationwide and worldwide efforts that share the goal of protecting the natural world.

Tracing the history of the Delaware, this book delves into archives and newspaper files to explore the men who tried to tame this wild river. Many attempted to venture down it in a variety of vehicles due to the needs of commerce, but in recent times it has been converted to leisure activities.

Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney's history of the community of Irish immigrant workers at the du Pont powder yards, Black Powder, White Lace, was published to wide acclaim. Now, as much of the materials Mulrooney used in her research are now electronically available to the public, and as debates about immigration continue to rage, a new edition of the book is being published to remind readers of the rich materials available on the du Pont workers, and of Mulrooney's powerful conclusions about immigrant communities in America. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts provided a host of benefits to their workers. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same. Employing a wide array of sources, Mulrooney turns away from the worksite and toward the domestic sphere, revealing that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer.