Risking All In Early Maryland: Disease, Death, and Demography

Join Historian Dr. Jean Russo as she explores the great risks that colonists undertook to create a better future than they could expect in Britain. Profound challenges confronted both individuals and Maryland society as a whole: a hostile disease environment, a skewed sex ratio, the lack of protective kinship networks, and the absence of a stable social hierarchy. Only over several generations did survivors gradually establish the foundation for a predominantly native-born population, and only with this demographic shift did the odds significantly improve for individual adventurers and their descendants seizing the opportunities that Maryland offered.