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Annotations / Notes: Only set of biographical sketches currently available on African-American women in Maryland. These contemporary women have made significant contributions to a wide range of professions.

Annotations / Notes: Following the restoration of proprietary government from royal control, which required their renunciation of Catholicism, this is a study of government under Charles Calvert (1715-51) and his son Frederick (1751-71), respectively the Fifth and Sixth Lord Baltimore. Neither considered the colony as more than a source of revenue and regularly appointed members of their family to run the colony with mixed results. Colonial politics quickly divided into proprietary and country party factions, often over the fexatious issue of tobacco inspection laws and later whether Maryland should be governed according the English statutes or only those recognized by the Proprietor, and the lower house of the legislature became the focal point of political friction. Unlike its neighbors, legislative recruitment was more open to the non-elite, so that lawyers and merchants emerged as political leaders. By mid-century, as the product of disputes between the lower house and the Proprietor over taxes and the costs of defending the colony, factions coalesced into identifiable parties. Among the more prominent leaders were Thomas Bordley and Daniel Dulany, who emerged during the dispute over English statutes, and later Charles Carroll.

Annotations / Notes: Bender examines the legal and economic assumptions underlying the conflict between the Chesapeake Canal Company and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the 1820s and 1830s to illustrate his argument about the triumph of "modernization" in the period. The conflict pitted the interests of the canal company to protect rights granted to it by its prior charter for westward development against the interests of the railroad in developing a competitive alternative. While the Maryland Court of Appeals applied conservative assumptions in ruling for the former, supporting the principle of monopoly, the state legislature, believing that competition advanced the interests of the state, applied "modernization" assumptions to force a compromise which permitted the railroad to proceed.

Annotations / Notes: The author spends some time discussing Maryland, and the Upper South in general, in order to emphasize geographic distinctions which impacted the status of free Negroes. He postulates that the treatment and status of free blacks foreshadowed the treatment of black people in general after emancipation. In addition, the author examines the various classes of free blacks to understand how different groups viewed their social role. For the elite, positions of leadership continued after the Civil War. Maryland is of particular interest since by 1810, almost one-quarter of Maryland's black population was free. Maryland therefore had the largest free black population of any state in the nation.