HP 106. Baltimore 1830-1840: Death in a Pre-Industrial City. Thomas L. Hollowak, 1998. 23 pages, photographs, paper. $1.95 [ISBN 1-8871-2419-5]

Maryland's colonial historians, Loren Walsh and Russell Menard observed that, "Death is a fundamental source of social discontinuity; knowledge of its frequency and of when it was most likely to strike is essential to understanding past socities. Douglas Stickle's research on Baltimore's 1800 Yellow Fever epidemic added a socio-economic dimension and found that the spacial distribution of deaths from annual plague resulted in the poor and destitute succumbing disproportionately to the wealthy.

This study expands upon Stickle's observation and looks at a decade during the city's pre-industrial period to further examine this premise that there were noticeable differences in the cause of death between established and marginal members of the town's residents.Through the use of internment records answers to this question regarding the percentage of deaths by certain causes between the various socio-economic strata, as well as between both a free and slave African American population that constituted Baltimore society in the decade between 1830-1840.