The Maryland History and Culture Bibliography
Breen, T. H. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Categories: Agriculture, County and Local History, Eighteenth Century, Chesapeake Region
Handwerker, Tom. "Something is Fishy Down on the Farm." Heartland of Del-Mar-Va 13 (Harvest 1991): 18-19.
Categories: Agriculture, Economic, Business, and Labor History, Caroline County, Cecil County, Dorchester County, Kent County, Queen Anne's County, Somerset County, Wicomico County, Worcester County, Eastern Shore
Middleton, Authur Pierce. Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of the Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era. Newport News, VA: Mariners Museum, 1953.
Categories: Agriculture, County and Local History, Economic, Business, and Labor History, Maritime, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Chesapeake Region
Sarudy, Barbara Wells. "Eighteenth-Century Gardens of the Chesapeake." A special issue of the Journal of Garden History: An International Quarterly 9 (July-Sept. 1989): 103-59.
Categories: Agriculture, County and Local History, Eighteenth Century, Chesapeake Region
Walsh, Lorena S. "Land, Landlord, and Leaseholder: Estate Management and Tenant Fortunes in Southern Maryland, 1642-1820." Agricultural History 59 (July 1985): 373-396.
Notes: Based on the astonishing records of a Jesuit-owned estate in Charles County that lasted for 175 years, Walsh examined 233 tenants, and the effect of their short term vs. long term leases on resource waste or conservation. The story explains how owners used leasing as a means for plantation development and as an alternative to slave labor.
Categories: African American, Agriculture, County and Local History, Economic, Business, and Labor History, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Charles County, Calvert County, St. Mary's County, Chesapeake Region
Blakey, Arch Frederick. General John H. Winder, C.S.A. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990.
Categories: Biography, Autobiography, and Reminiscences, Military, Nineteenth Century, Somerset County, Civil War, Eastern Shore
Byron, Gilbert. Gilbert Byron's Chesapeake Seasons: A Cove Journal. Wye Mills, MD: Chesapeake College Press, 1987.
Notes: Poet and chronicler Gilbert Byron's columns were a popular feature in several Eastern Shore newspapers. This collection of observations and reminiscences culled from his newspaper writings are both biographical and lyrical in quality. Byron captures both an appreciation for a nostalgic past and an awareness of the social and economic changes occurring on his beloved shore.
Categories: Biography, Autobiography, and Reminiscences, County and Local History, Chesapeake Region
Charbeneau, Jim. Shouts and Whispers: Stories from the Southern Chesapeake Bay. White Stone, VA: Brandylane Publishers, 1997.
Categories: Biography, Autobiography, and Reminiscences, County and Local History, Intellectual Life, Literature, and Publishing, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Chesapeake Region
Parker, Willie J. Game Warden: Chesapeake Assignment. Centreville, MD: Tidewater Publishers, 1983.
Categories: Biography, Autobiography, and Reminiscences, County and Local History, Environment, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Twentieth Century, Chesapeake Region
Turner, William H. Chesapeake Boyhood: Memoirs of a Farm Boy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Categories: Biography, Autobiography, and Reminiscences, County and Local History, Twentieth Century, Chesapeake Region
Davidson, Thomas E. "Free Blacks in Old Somerset County, 1745-1755." Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Summer 1985): 151-156.
Notes: County court records of Somerset County, Maryland during the eighteenth century are particularly complete, allowing for detailed studies of the county's population during that period. The author contributes to the scholarship which, up until 1985, focused primarily on the origins of black culture on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the seventeenth century. The author also adds to the growing scholarship on free blacks in this region, which tended to also focus on the seventeenth century. In addition to examining court records to determine the numbers of free Negroes and mulattoes, the author also attempts to determine how members of these populations obtained their free status, that is, through manumission or the as the result of being children of free mothers (free-born).
Categories: African American, County and Local History, Family History and Genealogy, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Eighteenth Century, Somerset County, Eastern Shore
Davidson, Thomas E. "Jacob Armstrong: Pioneer Black Capitalist on Maryland's Eastern Shore." Maryland Pendulum 4 (1986): 4-6.
Categories: African American, Biography, Autobiography, and Reminiscences, County and Local History, Economic, Business, and Labor History, Caroline County, Cecil County, Dorchester County, Queen Anne's County, Somerset County, Talbot County, Wicomico County, Worcester County, Eastern Shore
Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Notes: The author explores how free populations in Maryland - both black and white - challenged the notion of a slave society. The free black population, very much interconnected with the slave population in terms of kinship ties, also provided a threat to the underpinnings of the system. Once freedom arrived, social relationships also had to be redefined. The author writes that "free blacks did not occupy a unique or legitimate place within Maryland society, but instead formed an anomalous adjunct to the slave population" (3). By 1840, free blacks in Maryland composed 41% of the total black population of the state, or the largest free black population of any state in the nation.
Categories: African American, County and Local History, Economic, Business, and Labor History, Politics and Law, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Nineteenth Century, Chesapeake Region
Heinegg, Paul. Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware: From the Colonial Period to 1810. Baltimore: Clearfield, 2000.
Categories: African American, Family History and Genealogy, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Chesapeake Region
Johansen, Mary Carroll. "'Intelligence, Though Overlooked:' Education for Black Women in the Upper South, 1800-1840." Maryland Historical Magazine 93 (Winter 1998): 443-65.
Notes: Black and white educators established forty-six schools for free black children in the early nineteenth century. These educators supported education for black women believing that women transmitted knowledge and morals, thus shaping a generation of virtuous citizens. In addition, educators looked to education as a means by which to form self-sufficient and industrious free black communities.
Categories: African American, County and Local History, Education, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Women, Nineteenth Century, Chesapeake Region
Klein, Mary O. "'We Shall Be Accountable to God:' Some Inquiries into the Position of Blacks in Somerset Parish, Maryland, 1692-1865." Maryland Historical Magazine 87 (Winter 1992): 399-406.
Notes: The author examines the conversion of free blacks and slaves in Somerset Parish. While a 1664 Maryland law stated that baptism had no effect on the status of a slave, the Anglican church worked towards conversion of the enslaved. However, Christian education and baptism varied depending on individual slaveowners. In some cases, the enslaved themselves refused to be baptized. Evidence of African religious practices remained alongside the practice of Christianity.
Categories: African American, Religion, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Somerset County, Eastern Shore
Nelson, Jack E. "Black Pearl of the Chesapeake." Chesapeake Bay Magazine 23 (November 1993): 24-27.
Categories: African American, County and Local History, Chesapeake Region
"Selected Readings on Afro-Americans and Maryland's Eastern Shore." Maryland Pendulum 5 (Fall/Winter 1985): 6-7.
Categories: African American, Intellectual Life, Literature, and Publishing, Caroline County, Cecil County, Dorchester County, Queen Anne's County, Somerset County, Talbot County, Wicomico County, Worcester County, Eastern Shore
Tate, Thad W. "The Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake and Its Modern Historians." In The Chesapeake in the Seventeeth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman eds., 3-50. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
Categories: General, African American, Seventeenth Century, Chesapeake Region
Wennersten, John R. "A Cycle of Race Relations on Maryland's Eastern Shore: Somerset County, 1850-1917." Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Winter 1985): 377-382.
Categories: African American, Politics and Law, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Somerset County, Eastern Shore
Wennersten, John R., and Ruth Ellen Wennersten. "Separate and Unequal: The Evolution of a Black Land Grant College in Maryland, 1890-1930." Maryland Historical Magazine 72 (Spring 1977): 110-17.
Notes: The authors examine how Princess Anne Academy on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland developed after 1890 as a state and federally supported land grant school. Like other land grant schools, Princess Anne Academy was neglected by state and federal agencies. This academy was an example of separate education provided for blacks which demonstrated how land grant schools were indeed separate ad unequal.
Categories: African American, Education, Intellectual Life, Literature, and Publishing, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Somerset County, Eastern Shore
Wilson, Emily Wanda. The Public Education of Negroes on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. M.A. thesis, Howard University, 1948.
Categories: African American, Education, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Caroline County, Cecil County, Dorchester County, Queen Anne's County, Somerset County, Talbot County, Wicomico County, Worcester County, Eastern Shore
Yentsch, Anne. "Hot, Nourishing, and Culturally Potent: The Transfer of West African Cooking Traditions to the Chesapeake." Sage 9 (Summer 1995): 15-29.
Categories: African American, County and Local History, Ethnic History, Society, Social Change, Folklife, and Popular Culture, Chesapeake Region
Brinkley, M. Kent. "Fences in the Colonial Chesapeake: A Look Back at the Historic Types and Uses of Mid-Atlantic Fencing." Landscape Architecture 89 (May 1999): 75, 96, 98-99.
Categories: Architecture, Historic Preservation, and Town Planning, Science and Technology, Chesapeake Region
Sarudy, Barbara Wells. Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700-1805. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Notes: Gardens are the result of a particular culture and are an outward sign of a special grace, according to Maryland architecture writer H. Chandlee Forman. Early gardens reflected the tastes and enthusiasms of their owners as much as did their mansions. The author's engaging account of the significance of the domestic landscape to its proprietors and their visitors includes color illustrations of several of the estates.
Categories: Architecture, Historic Preservation, and Town Planning, Environment, Eighteenth Century, Chesapeake Region