Crabs, Catholics, and Constant Drama: An Irreverent History of Maryland

Maryland is tiny. Maryland is consequential. Maryland has never once confused these two facts as being in tension.

From the Chesapeake Bay's Indigenous trading world to tobacco plantations to Civil War battlefields to crab-seasoned identity politics, Crabs, Catholics, and Constant Drama is the history of a state that has spent four centuries being more important than people remember and more contradictory than it will admit. It was founded as a Catholic refuge and immediately started running on coercion. It demanded liberty while codifying slavery. It tried to stay out of the Civil War and got physically clamped into one. It built one of America's great cities and then spent a hundred years arguing about whose fault that city was.

This is not a history that irons out the complications. It is a history that follows them, because the complications are the story: the gap between Maryland's stated ideals and its practiced reality, between who it included in its prosperity and who it left out, between the polished myth and the jagged history underneath it.

Dry, sharp, and thoroughly researched, Crabs, Catholics, and Constant Drama covers everything from the Piscataway to Thurgood Marshall to the oyster collapse to the Maryland flag, which is a lot for one piece of heraldry to carry.

Maryland may be small. It has never mistaken that for a reason to be modest.

And the seasoning really is excellent.