The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of "modern-day" lynchings. On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."

This unique book combines state-specific facts and 30 fun-to-do hands-on projects. The History Project Book includes creating a cartoon panel to describe how your state name may have come about, creating a fort replica, making a state history museum, dressing up as a famous explorer and recreating the main discovery, and more! Kids will have a blast and build essential knowledge skills including research, reading, writing, science and math. Great for students in K-8 grades and for displaying in the classroom, library or home.

"'Good evening, I'm Ric Cottom' is the well-recognized introduction to Your Maryland on WYPR. When, in 2001, Ric signed on to deliver a weekly segment on Maryland history during All Things Considered on WYPR, his was the first short-form radio spot the station featured. Ric narrates little-known human interest stories from any point in Maryland's past, from the early colonial period through the start of the twentieth century. He discovered many of the stories during his time as the director of the Maryland Historical Society, researching factual histories that he could deliver in a storytelling format. The genre is unique, blending narrative or literary nonfiction with regional history. The mission behind Ric's segment is to entertain his audience while sparking their interest in history. Ric has an unusual talent for discovering stories and weaving them into a fascinating narrative. All scenes from Maryland history are fitting for 'Your Maryland.' Ric carefully selects stories that he can convey with some comedy. Even those stories with heavier subject matter, as in the short biography of gunsmith and executioner John Dandy, are conveyed with some dark humor and levity. The volume here collects approximately half of all of the 'Your Maryland' stories Ric has composed over the years and presents them in chronological format. It is the type of book that people might read a little bit at a time, perhaps out of order, and not necessarily cover-to-cover. It's designed as a little book for a very broad audience of Marylanders"--Provided by publisher.

A book documenting the history of the Historic community of Sugarland in Montgomery County, Maryland.

These photographs reveal places we know but scarcely recognize and give us another look at the people of the greatest generation.

Explores the ironies, contradictions, and compromises that give "America's oldest border state"its special character. Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Maryland: A Middle Temperament explores the ironies, contradictions, and compromises that give "America's oldest border state" its special character. Extensively illustrated and accompanied by bibliography, maps, charts, and tables, Robert Brugger's vivid account of the state's political, economic, social, and cultural heritage—from the outfitting of Cecil Calvert's expedition to the opening of Baltimore's Harborplace—is rich in the issues and personalities that make up Maryland's story and explain its "middle temperament."

Finding Charity’s Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman’s reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women’s future interactions with the state.