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Maryland is a state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia to the south and west, Pennsylvania to the north, and Delaware to the east. It is comparable in size to the European country of Belgium. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Maryland has the highest median household income of any state, having surpassed New Jersey in 2006; Maryland's median household income was $68,080 in 2007.[1] It was the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution and bears two nicknames, the Old Line State and the Free State. Maryland is a life sciences hub with over 350 biotechnology firms, making it the third-largest such cluster in the nation. Institutions and agencies located throughout Maryland include the University System of Maryland, The Johns Hopkins University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Celera Genomics, Human Genome Sciences (HGS), the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), MedImmune (recently purchased by AstraZeneca), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
History
In 1629, George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore in the Irish House of Lords, fresh from his failure further north with Newfoundland's Avalon colony, applied to Charles I for a new royal charter for what was to become the Province of Maryland. Calvert's interest in creating a colony derived from his Catholicism and his desire for the creation of a haven for Catholics in the new world. In addition, he was familiar with the fortunes that had been made in tobacco in Virginia, and hoped to recoup some of the financial losses he had sustained in his earlier colonial venture in Newfoundland. George Calvert died in April 1632, but a charter for "Maryland Colony" (in Latin, "Terra Maria") was granted to his son, Cæcilius Calvert, 2nd Lord Baltimore, on June 20, 1632. The new colony was named in honor of Henrietta Maria, Queen Consort of Charles I. The specific name given in the charter was phrased "Terra Mariae, anglice, Maryland". The English name was preferred over the Latin due in part to the undesired association of "Mariae" with the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana. Leonard, Cecilius' younger brother, was put in charge of the expedition because Cecilius did not want to go. To try to gain settlers, Maryland used what is known as the headright system, which originated in Jamestown. The government awarded land to people who transported colonists to Maryland. On March 25, 1634, Lord Baltimore sent the first settlers into this area. Although most of the settlers were Protestants, Maryland soon became one of the few regions in the British Empire where Catholics held the highest positions of political authority. Maryland was also one of the key destinations of tens of thousands of British convicts. The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 was one of the first laws that explicitly dictated religious tolerance, though toleration was limited to Trinitarian Christians. The royal charter granted Maryland the Potomac River and territory northward to the fortieth parallel. This proved a problem when Charles II granted a charter for Pennsylvania, because the grants (which were made using an inaccurate map) overlapped. Maryland's northern boundary would put Philadelphia, the major city in Pennsylvania, partially within Maryland, while Pennsylvania's southern boundary would encompass much of Maryland, resulting in conflict between the Calvert family, which controlled Maryland, and the Penn family, which controlled Pennsylvania. This led to the Cresap's War (also known as the Conojocular War), a border conflict between Pennsylvania and Maryland, fought in the 1730s. Hostilities erupted in 1730 with a series of violent incidents prompted by disputes over property rights and law enforcement, and escalated through the first half of the decade, culminating in the deployment of military forces by Maryland in 1736 and by Pennsylvania in 1737. The armed phase of the conflict ended in May 1738 with the intervention of King George II, who compelled the negotiation of a cease-fire. A final settlement was not achieved until 1767, when the Mason-Dixon Line was recognized as the permanent boundary between the two colonies. After Virginia made the practice of Anglicanism mandatory, a large number of Puritans migrated from Virginia to Maryland, and were given land for a settlement called Providence (now Annapolis). In 1650, the Puritans revolted against the proprietary government and set up a new government that outlawed both Catholicism and Anglicanism. In March 1654, the 2nd Lord Baltimore sent an army under the command of Governor William Stone to put down the revolt. His Roman Catholic army was decisively defeated by a Puritan army near Annapolis in what was to be known as the "Battle of the Severn". The Puritan revolt lasted until 1658. In that year the Calvert family regained control of the colony and re-enacted the Toleration Act. However, after England's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, when William of Orange and his wife Mary came to the throne and firmly established the Protestant faith in England, Catholicism was again outlawed in Maryland, until after the American Revolutionary War. Many wealthy plantation owners built chapels on their land so they could practice their Catholicism in relative secrecy. During the persecution of Maryland Catholics by the Puritan revolutionary government, all of the original Catholic churches of southern Maryland were burned down. St. Mary's City was the largest site of the original Maryland colony, and was the seat of the colonial government until 1708. St Mary's is now a historical site, with a small tourist center. In 1708, the seat of government was moved to Providence, which had been renamed Annapolis. The city was renamed in honor of Queen Anne in 1694. Most of the English colonists arrived in Maryland as indentured servants, hiring themselves out as laborers for a fixed period to pay for their passage. In the early years the line between indentured servants and African slaves or laborers was fluid. Some Africans were allowed to earn their freedom before slavery became a lifelong status. Most of the free colored families formed in Maryland before the Revolution were descended from relationships or marriages between servant or free white women and enslaved, servant or free African or African-American men. Many such families migrated to Delaware, where land was cheaper. As the flow of indentured laborers to the colony decreased with improving economic conditions in England, more slaves were imported. The economy's growth and prosperity was based on slave labor, devoted first to the production of tobacco.
Maryland was one of the thirteen colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution. On February 2, 1781, Maryland became the 13th state to approve the ratification of the Articles of Confederation which brought into being the United States as a united, sovereign and national state. It also became the seventh state admitted to the U.S. after ratifying the new Constitution. The following year, in December 1790, Maryland ceded land selected by President George Washington to the federal government for the creation of Washington, D.C.. The land was provided from Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, as well as from Fairfax County and Alexandria in Virginia (though the lands from Virginia were later returned through retrocession). The land provided to Washington, D.C. is actually "sitting" inside the state of Maryland (land that is now defunct in theory). During the War of 1812, the British military attempted to capture the port of Baltimore, which was protected by Fort McHenry. It was during this bombardment that the Star Spangled Banner was written by Francis Scott Key. As in Virginia and Delaware, numerous planters in Maryland had freed their slaves in the twenty years after the Revolutionary War. By 1860 Maryland's free black population comprised 49.1% of the total of African Americans in the state. In addition, Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks temporarily suspended the legislature, and President Abraham Lincoln had many of its fire eaters arrested prior to its reconvening. Many historians contend that there would never have been sufficient votes for secession. Of the 115,000 men who joined the militaries during the Civil War, 85,000, or 77%, joined the Union army. To help ensure Maryland's inclusion in the Union, President Lincoln suspended several civil liberties, including the writ of habeas corpus, an act deemed illegal by Maryland native Chief Justice Roger Taney. Lincoln ordered U.S. troops to place artillery on Federal Hill to threaten the city of Baltimore, and helped ensure the election of a new pro-union governor and legislature. Lincoln went so far as to jail certain pro-South members of the state legislature at Fort McHenry, including the Mayor of Baltimore, George William Brown. The grandson of Francis Scott Key was included in those jailed. The constitutionality of these actions is still debated. Because Maryland remained in the Union, it was exempted from the anti-slavery provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation (The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to states in rebellion). In 1864 the state held a constitutional convention that culminated in the passage of a new state constitution. Article 24 of that document outlawed the practice of slavery. In 1867 the state extended suffrage to non-white males. Timeline
Population History
Note: Maryland was one of the 13 original States. It helped form the District of Columbia in 1791; its boundaries have been substantially unchanged since then, although the Maryland-West Virginia boundary was in dispute as late as 1910. Census coverage has included the entire State from 1790 on. The 1790 population includes the present area of the District of Columbia, separated from Maryland in 1791. The 1840 results for Montgomery County are from a re-enumeration of the population as of 1840, conducted in 1841.. Parts of Prince George's and Montgomery Counties were taken to form the District of Columbia in 1791. Research Tips
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