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On Afric's Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834-1857

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With much of the historiography of Liberia concentrating on the settlement planted at Monrovia by the American Colonization Society in 1822 and which proclaimed its independence in 1847, the colony independently founded by the Maryland State Colonization Society in 1831 near Cape Palmas and not incorporated into Liberia until 1857 is all but forgotten. Richard Hall now fills this lacuna with his excellent account of the "Colony of Maryland in Africa," later the "State of Maryland in Africa," which was the home some of the oldest educational institutions in the West African nation and which held a disportionate influence on its subsequent development. The reader can pick up where the author leaves off by referring to the important political histories written by Dr. Amos Sawyer (The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia, 1992) and, more recently, by Dr. John Peter Pham (Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State, 2004).