History is all around Maryland—where people live, where they work, where they play and worship and socialize. Streets lined with boxy World War II-era houses surround a large factory, now shuttered. Tourists pay to ride a skipjack, recalling the glory days of oystering on the Chesapeake Bay. A rundown colonial manor house sits atop a hill, surveying the athletic complex that has replaced its tobacco and corn fields. Another cornfield, this one outside Sharpsburg, is preserved as possibly the most tragic thirty acres in American history. An elderly woman teaches her granddaughter to make beaten biscuits. A tidy wooden church, built by former slaves and used by their descendants as a rallying point for civil rights, testifies to the enduring place of religion in the African American community.

The Maryland Online Encyclopedia (MdOE) will help Americans understand the people, sites, events, ideas, culture, and folkways that over hundreds of years have shaped the Maryland of today. It will constitute the definitive reference work on Maryland history and culture. Its chronological scope will encompass the prehistoric period to the present, while its geographical range will reach from the Atlantic beaches of the Eastern Shore across the Chesapeake Bay to the Appalachian mountains of western Maryland. Written by historians and other scholars from all over the country, its illustrated entries will draw on current scholarship and original research. It will place the state’s history in the context of national trends and events and will point its readers to resources—books, web sites, museums, archives, libraries, historic sites—where they can explore topics in greater depth. Additionally, MdOE will provide the “intellectual glue” for numerous projects that are digitizing primary and secondary sources about Maryland by providing the historical background and context for those efforts.