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| Maryland Piscataway | |
|---|---|
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| Capital | Annapolis |
| Largest city | Baltimore |
Maryland is a state on the Atlantic coast of the United States, bordering both shores of the Chesapeake Bay. It covers an area of 32,131 km² and has a population of approximately 6,263,220 as of the 2024 US Census. The state is heavily urbanized, with the vast majority of residents concentrated in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan corridor. The administrative center is Annapolis; the largest city and principal port is Baltimore.[1]
Maryland has been economically orienting itself toward the federal government and the military-intelligence apparatus through its proximity to the headquarters of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the US military and the integration of Amazon into the American military-intelligence apparatus, with Maryland offering 8.5 billion for the integration and financial benefits though Amazon chose Virginia, as a result of the deindustrialization. [1]
History
Maryland was inhabited for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonialists. The main Indigenous nations of the Chesapeake Bay region included the Piscataway, who lived on the western shore of the bay and the Potomac River valley; the Nanticoke, who lived on the Eastern Shore and the Delmarva Peninsula; the Accohannock and Assateague on the lower Eastern Shore; and the Susquehannock, who lived along the Susquehanna River at the head of the bay. The Lenni Lenape, whose territory extended across the mid-Atlantic from the Delaware Bay through present-day New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and into Maryland, also had notable presence in the region.[1]
They lived in mixed agricultural, fishing, and hunting societies. The Piscataway and Nanticoke cultivated maize, beans, and squash in the lowlands, harvested oysters and fish from the Chesapeake and its tributaries, and hunted in the forests of the Piedmont and coastal plain, in a form of egalitarian primitive communism in which there was a culture which treated children with a level of gentleness unknown in the western world and shared resources.[1]
European contact intentionally brought disease, specifically smallpox which cratered the Indigenous population, likely killing the majority within decades of first contact, as it did across the Americas. Colonialists' introduction of alcohol and the fur trade disrupted existing social relations and fostered an addiction to their goods, in short primitive accumulation, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population occurred in Maryland just as in the rest of the colonies. [1]
The colony of Maryland was founded in 1632 when King Charles I of England granted a charter to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Lord Baltimore, establishing the colony as a proprietary possession of the Calvert family. This charter authorized the seizure of lands inhabited by the indigenous Piscataway and other natives. The colonial government used a combination of fraudulent treaties, mass murder, and the pitting of indigenous nations against one another to dispossess them. The Susquehannock, who had been the main power in the region spanning Maryland, were destroyed as a nation by the late 1670s. The Piscataway were violently driven from their ancestral lands by the early 1700s. The Nanticoke were ethnically cleansed off the Eastern Shore. [1]
The colony served as a safe space for English Catholics, though they accepted Protestants but as time went on sectarian tensions began to bubble, which was remedied with The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, though as the Protestants became the majority the policies were overturned during a Protestant-led revolt. It was economically reliant on tobacco cultivation, éxploting indentured servants initially and, increasingly after the late 1600s, by enslaved Africans. By the 18th century, Maryland had become one of the largest tobacco-producing colonies of British North America. Baltimore was established as a port town in 1729 and grew rapidly into a big commercial center.[1]
Maryland was one of the thirteen colonies that revolted against the British, by the 19th century, Maryland’s economy diversified with Baltimore emerging as a major industrial and transportation hub. Maryland was a slaveholding state but not part of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. It had an high amount of pro-Confederate sympathizers which led to President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and placed federal troops in Baltimore to prevent the state from seceding.[1]
After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Maryland industrialised, specifically in Baltimore, which became a hub of steel production, shipbuilding, and manufacturing. The Sparrows Point mill, opened in 1916 by Bethlehem Steel, became the largest steel mill in the world by the mid-20th century reliant on immigrant labor which transformed Maryland's working-class composition. Though Maryland's industrial base eroded over time, steel production declined throughout and deindustrialization spread entrenched poverty within the state especially among the marginalized and vulnerable African-American population, which erupted in the police killing of Freddie Gray sparking mass protests in Baltimore. Maryland responded with a military takeover of the city under a Democratic mayor and a state of emergency by the Republican governor.[1]
Maryland in recent times, decaying infrastructure, poverty, police violence, and the absence of any political power for the working class in the state. As of 2025 to 2026, one in three Maryland residents was food insecure, and 40% of those made above the income threshold that would qualify them for food assistance. [1]