The daring women of Maryland made their mark on history as spies, would-be queens and fiery suffragettes. Sarah Wilson escaped indentured servitude in Frederick by impersonating the queen's sister. In Cumberland, Sallie Pollock smuggled letters for top Confederate officials. Baltimore journalist Marguerite Harrison snuck into Russia to report conditions there after World War I. From famous figures like Harriet Tubman to unsung heroines like "Lady Law" Violet Hill Whyte, author Lauren R. Silberman introduces Maryland's most tenacious and adventurous women.

The US Supreme Court’s 1937 decision in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, upholding the constitutionality of Washington State’s minimum wage law for women, had monumental consequences for all American workers. It also marked a major shift in the Court’s response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. In Making Minimum Wage, Helen J. Knowles tells the human story behind this historic case. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish pitted a Washington State hotel against a chambermaid, Elsie Parrish, who claimed that she was owed the state’s minimum wage. The hotel argued that under the concept of “freedom of contract,” the US Constitution allowed it to pay its female workers whatever low wages they were willing to accept. Knowles unpacks the legal complexities of the case while telling the litigants’ stories. Drawing on archival and private materials, including the unpublished memoir of Elsie’s lawyer, C. B. Conner, Knowles exposes the profound courage and resolve of the former chambermaid. Her book reveals why Elsie—who, in her mid-thirties was already a grandmother—was fired from her job at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, and why she undertook the outsized risk of suing the hotel for back wages. Minimum wage laws are “not an academic question or even a legal one,” Elinore Morehouse Herrick, the New York director of the National Labor Relations Board, said in 1936. Rather, they are “a human problem.” A pioneering analysis that illuminates the life stories behind West Coast Hotel v. Parrish as well as the case’s impact on local, state, and national levels, Making Minimum Wage vividly demonstrates the fundamental truth of Morehouse Herrick’s statement.

Chesapeake Crimes: Storm Warning is the latest installment of the Agatha- and Anthony-award-winning Chesapeake Crimes series. This volume features tales by: Donna Andrews Timothy Bentler-Jungr Shaun Taylor Bevins Carla Coupe Maddi Davidson Linda Ensign Barb Goffman Kim Kash Adam Meyer Alan Orloff KM Rockwood Lauren R. Silberman Marianne Wilski Strong Art Taylor Robin Templeton "The diabolical sisters of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime have raised the stakes: not only asking their astute members to offer up a gem of a short story, but to add a degree of difficulty. It has to be about the weather.... Rain, snowstorms, hurricanes. The glare of the sun. The shrouding fog. Clouds, mist, hail, and icy roads. The Chessies have used their writerly talent to embrace the weather, to relish it, and to provide us with a raft of meteorological (and deadly) delights." -- Hank Phillippi Ryan, bestselling author of the Jane Ryland series

The daring women of Maryland made their mark on history as spies, would-be queens and fiery suffragettes. Sarah Wilson escaped indentured servitude in Frederick by impersonating the queen's sister. In Cumberland, Sallie Pollock smuggled letters for top Confederate officials. Baltimore journalist Marguerite Harrison snuck into Russia to report conditions there after World War I. From famous figures like Harriet Tubman to unsung heroines like "Lady Law" Violet Hill Whyte, author Lauren R. Silberman introduces Maryland's most tenacious and adventurous women.