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Annotations / Notes: Most women coming to Maryland in the seventeenth century were indentured servants between ages eighteen and twenty-five. Hard work in the tobacco fields, late marriage, and early death awaited them. However, for the woman who survived seasoning and their period of service, the sexual imbalance let them choose her husband and seize the opportunity to become a planter's wife. She risked childbirth, bore three to four children, and hoped one or two lived to adulthood. Widows remarried quickly, and complex families were the norm.

Annotations / Notes: Carr and Walsh make detailed use of probate records from seventeenth and eighteenth century Maryland to argue that the period in Chesapeake area history represented a shift from an early emphasis upon material necessities to an improved standard of living marked by "gentility." The authors contend that this change reached across class lines and helped to fuel, rather than check, the productive economy of the colony. The article includes extensive tables and graphs of evidence regarding consumer items for several Maryland and Virginia counties.

Annotations / Notes: Many towns in the Chesapeake area failed during the seventeenth century. Towns were not needed as commercial centers for the tobacco trade, the major economy of the area at that time. Carr uses St. Mary's City as an example of such a failure.

Annotations / Notes: Carr contends that the experience of moving from England to the Chesapeake region of America in the seventeenth century was not simply a change of homeland, but a drastic change in lifestyle. She evaluates such factors as marriage, birth rates, life expectancy, diet, housing, working conditions and social freedoms for the English who chose to emigrate to America in that first century. Carr argues that, with the exception of diet, the standard of living may have been higher had the colonists remained in England, but in terms of economic independence and some degree of political participation, their prospects in the New World were superior.

Annotations / Notes: This is an especially cogent overview by the dean of the modern Chesapeake School of historians of the major issues concerning Maryland's founding and the travails encountered by those who settled there over the remainder of the century. It should also tantalize readers to consult her many other publications.

Annotations / Notes: Challenging the prevailing notion that seventeenth century Maryland politics were inherently chaotic, Carr argues that community networks were being formed through which information was exchanged and community oversight imposed, and that County courts emerged as de facto local governments. Local men, who may have been planters or former indentured servants, were appointed as justices. During the hiatus following the Revolution of 1689 local government continued to operate. After discussing the various political crises before and after 1689, Carr concludes that the underlying cause of Maryland's political instability was a failure of leadership of the men at the top of Maryland society.

Annotations / Notes: The structure, powers and functions of local government, which were established in the seventeenth century lasted well into the twentieth century with only slight changes. Based upon English precedents, local power was vested in a system of county courts, and power was not shared with parish vestries until establishment of the Anglican Church in 1692, and even then the vestry never attained the influence it did in Virginia. For most of this time the justices sitting as a group in the county court exercised executive power. During the instability of the Glorious Revolution, the county courts continued to function. Given the high mortality in the seventeenth century, service was not restricted to men who were wealthy or well connected, although that would change in the next century.