Migrating waterfowl overwinter here, and hunting for geese and ducks has been an important part of the county's history.

The first Anglo-European settlement in Maryland was on Kent Island on August 21, 1631, and included twenty-five settlers in a manor house, a fort, and other buildings.

The county has a number of properties on the National Register of Historic Places,[3] but nothing remains of this original settlement.

In 1713, Queen Anne's County became an English postal district; the sheriff was also appointed as the postmaster and would travel to Annapolis, Maryland by boat across the Chesapeake Bay to obtain mail.

By the time of Independence, the county had several churches, a government, school, and a postal system.

They sold excess slaves in the domestic trade to the developing cotton plantations of the Deep South.

In 1876, Queen Anne's County had the first printed independent paper called the Maryland Citizen.

A railway was constructed here in 1868; it operated from Baltimore, passing around the top of the Chesapeake Bay down to Queenstown, and connected with other railroads that continued east into[4] Delaware as far as Rehoboth, and southward to the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

In the 20th century, Queen Anne's County was the home of Jimmie Foxx, who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Queen Anne's was historically the most strongly secessionist county in Maryland, dominated by the Democratic Party of the planters.

Following the American Civil War, the predominately conservative white voters voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election from 1868 to 1948, though Herbert Hoover came within a point of defeating Al Smith in 1928 amidst great Southern resentment to Smith's Catholicism and opposition to Prohibition.

Since the late 20th century, Queen Anne's white voters have largely shifted to the Republican Party, in a realignment that has taken place among conservative whites across the South following the tumultuous 1960s and passage of national civil rights legislation.

No Democratic presidential candidate has carried Queen Anne's County since Texan Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide.

Queen Anne's County was granted home rule in 1990 under a state code.

As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 47,798 people, 18,016 households, and 13,314 families living in the county.