This book about Somerset County and the surrounding region traces the course of racism and society in a tidewater county in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay country from 1850 to the present. Tidewater Somerset provides us with a palette for understanding racism and the evolution of racial ideas often overlooked by scholars. The book examines specific influences and trends, as well as political and cultural developments, which have played out at the micro-level in Maryland over time, and which might test or call into question assumptions about the nature of race relations on the national level.