Historian/Scholar Honors

To persons who have published and are respected in the academic and professional historian community

The 2024 honorees are:

Jane Berger

In a path-breaking study, Jane Berger chronicles the rise of Baltimore’s “New Working Class,” as seen by the expansion of Baltimore’s work force during 1950-70, including an increase in the number of Black employees, especially Black women. The impetus for this expansion came in part from the War of Poverty programs of the late 1960s. Many of the new workers joined unions, which they saw as helping to protect their jobs and benefits. A backdrop to all of this was Baltimore’s de-industrialization as numerous manufacturers closed or moved. Berger criticizes Mayor Schaefer, who demanded austerity for social programs in order to maintain a strong credit rating and promoted investment in Baltimore’s waterfront and tourism in the Inner Harbor. The federal government in the 1980s likewise cut back on social programs, but increased its support of law enforcement. In her conclusion, she surveys developments since the 1990s, criticizing the practice of tax breaks to developers.

Teresa Moyer

In Ancestors of Worthy Life: Plantation Slavery and Black Heritage at Mount Clare, a balanced discussion of racialized practice at historic site museums, Moyer presents a rich and contextualized study of the inextricably entangled lives of the enslaved, free blacks, and white landowners. She demonstrates that inclusive interpretation of plantation and other historic house museum sites can be done. Moyer argues that the inclusion of enslaved persons in the history of these sites would honor those "ancestors of worthy note," make the social good of public history available to African Americans, and address systemic racism in America.

She concludes her discussion by pointing out members of that black population who attained their own level of historical greatness in the course of their lives. She describes a specific example, Henry Harden, who had been enslaved by the Carroll family and who became a significant participant in the creation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church movement. He is part of the story too.

Scott Shane

“Flee North” features Thomas Smallwood (1801-83), a free Black in Washington, who orchestrated the escape of about 300 enslaved Blacks to Canada during 1842-43 and coined the phrase “underground railroad.” He collaborated with abolitionist Charles Torrey in Albany, who published a journal in which Smallwood derided the enslavers whose slaves had fled. Shane also portrays Hope Slatter, a notorious slave-dealer in Baltimore who sold hundreds of Blacks to New Orleans. Maryland was a sort of battleground between those who tried to maintain slavery and those who sought to escape.

Fearing arrest, Smallwood escaped with his family to Canada in late 1843. Torrey then came to Maryland and helped some Blacks escape but was arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison, where he died of tuberculosis in 1845. Slatter became wealthy but was never accepted into Baltimore’s social circles. He sold his business in 1848 and moved to Mobile, Alabama, where he bought and sold real estate until his death in 1853.

The 2023 honorees are:

José F. Anderson

José F. Anderson earned a B.A. at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a J.D. from the University of Maryland. After graduation, he engaged in the private practice of law in Baltimore and served for nine years in the Maryland Public Defender’s Office. He is now the Dean Joseph Curtis Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore and Adjunct Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A frequent speaker at local and national attorney and judicial training conferences, he is the author of many articles and a textbook on Criminal Law. In 2021, after years of research, he published a ground-breaking biography of the preeminent civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, Genius for Justice: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Reform of American Law. Houston was a Harvard-trained Supreme Court lawyer for the NAACP, a pioneer in the fight for desegregating America, and the mentor of Justice Thurgood Marshall. As the person who designed the long-range legal strategy of the Brown v. Board of Education case, Houston is often called the man who killed "Jim Crow." He also transformed American law in labor, criminal justice, and the First Amendment. Houston, who maintained an office in Baltimore and conducted much work here, said, “As goes Maryland, so goes a large part of the nation.”

Robert K. Headley

Dr. Headley began documenting the history of the vanishing American movie theatre in 1968. Since then, he has continued in his unsurpassed research of this resource. Revealing a deep knowledge of Baltimore’s movie houses, his essential publications are: Exit: A History Of Movies In Baltimore and Motion Picture Exhibition In Baltimore: An Illustrated History And Directory Of Theaters, 1895-2004. From 1981-1987, Headley was editor of the journal of the Theatre Historical Society of America. He has taught courses on Baltimore theater history, appeared on talk shows, conducted tours, and served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution. He graciously shared his collection of rare photographs and his wealth of information with photographer Amy Davis for her publication and exhibit “Flickering Treasures.” Our movie houses may come and go, but thanks to Dr. Headley’s untiring research, their history can be known and valued well into the future.

Adam Malka

A professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, Malka published “Men of Mobtown” in 2018. It traces the evolution of the relationship between policing and Blacks from 1800 to 1870. As of 1810, a majority of Blacks in Baltimore were free, and the percentage steadily increased up until the Civil War. Initially, Baltimore’s policemen or constables received no salaries, and lived from fees and rewards. As many ordinary Whites saw Blacks as potential criminals, they acted as vigilantes, enforcing the law as they saw it. Up to 1860, the percentage of Blacks in jail differed little from their percentage in the overall population. During the Civil War, Maryland abolished slavery, but the presumption by Whites of Black criminality remained widespread. Baltimore’s police, which became more professional in the late 1850s (with salaries and uniforms), arrested a much higher percentage of Blacks in the years after 1865, supplementing White vigilantism. Professor Malka sheds light on the 19th century mindset of Whites towards Blacks, which he documents with numerous quotes and case histories.

E. Evans Paull

Longtime urban planner E. Evans Paull recounts the Baltimore Road Wars of the 1950s through the 1980s in his book, “Stop the Road: Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars.” Highway planners had proposed extending I-95 and I-83 through the historic neighborhoods of Federal Hill, Fells Point and Canton, while I-70 was to connect with the downtown highways. Grassroots opposition, including neighborhood activists, preservationists, 1960s idealists and environmentalists coalesced to defeat these plans, as the Black neighborhoods of West Baltimore worked with the largely White waterfront neighborhoods. Paull also shows that some planners, along with some city officials, opposed these proposals. Frequent delays made implementation more difficult. In retrospect, the waterfront neighborhoods have thrived, but the Black neighborhoods were disrupted by the partial completion of the “Highway to Nowhere” and by the announced plans to build the I-70 connector. This is an inspiring account of how Baltimore’s citizens did their best to save their city from its own leadership.

Past honorees, in alphabetical order:

Jean H. Baker (2007)

Joseph Balkoski (2013)

Stanley F. Battle (2005)

Howell S. Baum (2013)

Randall Beirne (2006)

David S. Bogen (2017)

Taylor Branch (2004)

James Bready (2012)

John R. Breihan (2010)

Christopher Brown (2017)

Lawrence T. Brown (2022)