Lois Green Carr

Lois Green Carr (1922–2015) was a historian of Colonial Maryland and the European settlement of the Chesapeake Bay, serving as the principal historian of St. Mary's City, Maryland for over four decades.

Biography[]

Carr was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts on March 7, 1922, the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Constance McLaughlin Green.^[1][2] She attended The Putney School in Putney, Vermont and earned a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College.^[3] She earned a master's degree from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.^[1]

Twenty-four years elapsed between Carr's master's degree and her Ph.D., because she left Harvard in 1947 after getting married and moving to New York.^[2][3] She later moved to Maryland, divorced and remarried, and started a new thesis on Maryland history, finishing her doctorate in 1968.^[3] She had one son from her first marriage, Andrew R. Clark.^[1]

Carr started as a junior archivist in 1956 at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, becoming a senior adjunct scholar in 1988.^[4] She became the historian for Historic St. Mary's City in 1967, founding a research program seeking to document the lives of every known 17th-century St. Mary's resident.^[1][4] She was president of the Economic History Association in 1990–91.^[5]

Carr was an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1982 to 2005.^[2] She was a pioneer in the field of colonial history, designing and directing several long-term team history research projects that won support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.^[5] In 1992, the a conference was organized at the University of Maryland in her honor, Lois Green Carr: The Chesapeake and Beyond - A Celebration.^[6]

Carr was a co-author of Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland, which won the Alice Hanson Jones Prize from the Economic History Association in 1992 and the Maryland Historical Society Book prize in 1993.^[6] She was one of the 1996 recipients of the Eisenberg Prize for Excellence in the Humanities.^[7] In 2000 she was named to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.^[1][6]

Carr died of dementia complications in Annapolis, Maryland on June 28, 2015.^[1]

Publications[]

• Carr, Lois Green; Menard, Russell R.; Walsh, Lorena Seebach (1991). Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807843413.
• Carr, Lois Green (1988). Colonial Chesapeake Society. Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. ISBN 9780807818008.
• Papenfuse, Edward C.; Stiverson, Gregory A.; Collins, Susan A.; Carr, Lois Green (1976). Maryland: a new guide to the Old Line State. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801818745.
• Carr, Lois Green; Jordan, David William (1974). Maryland's Revolution of Government, 1689-1692. Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801407932.

References[]