A Brotherhood of Liberty

In A Brotherhood of Liberty, Dennis Patrick Halpin shifts the focus of the black freedom struggle from the Deep South to argue that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1870s and early 1880s, a dynamic group of black political leaders migrated to Baltimore from rural Virginia and Maryland. These activists, mostly former slaves who subsequently trained in the ministry, pushed Baltimore to fulfill Reconstruction's promise of racial equality. In doing so, they were part of a larger effort among African Americans to create new forms of black politics by founding churches, starting businesses, establishing community centers, and creating newspapers. Black Baltimoreans successfully challenged Jim Crow regulations on public transit, in the courts, in the voting booth, and on the streets of residential neighborhoods. They formed some of the nation's earliest civil rights organizations, including the United Mutual Brotherhood of Liberty, to define their own freedom in the period after the Civil War.

Halpin shows how black Baltimoreans' successes prompted segregationists to reformulate their tactics. He examines how segregationists countered activists' victories by using Progressive Era concerns over urban order and corruption to criminalize and disenfranchise African Americans. Indeed, he argues the Progressive Era was crucial in establishing the racialized carceral state of the twentieth-century United States. Tracing the civil rights victories scored by black Baltimoreans that inspired activists throughout the nation and subsequent generations, A Brotherhood of Liberty highlights the strategies that can continue to be useful today, as well as the challenges that may be faced.

Baltimore's Deaf Heritage

The booming job market and beautifully designed city of Baltimore attracted many families and individuals to the area in the 19th century. Several of these transplants would become prominent figures in the Deaf community. George W. Veditz, an early American Sign Language filmmaker and former president of the National Association of the Deaf; Rev. Daniel E. Moylan, founder of the oldest operational Methodist church for the deaf; and George Michael "Dummy" Leitner, a professional baseball player, all influenced Baltimore's growing deaf population. Through vintage photographs of successful organizations and sports teams, including the Silent Oriole Club, Christ Church of the Deaf, the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore, the Silent Clover Society, and the National Fraternal Society for the Deaf, Baltimore's Deaf Heritage illustrates the evolution of Baltimore's Deaf community and its prominent leaders.

The Baltimore Black Sox: A Negro Leagues History, 1913-1936

Providing a comprehensive history of the Baltimore Black Sox from before the team's founding in 1913 through its demise in 1936, this history examines the social and cultural forces that gave birth to the club and informed its development. The author describes aspects of Baltimore's history in the first decades of the 20th century, details the team's year-by-year performance, explores front-office and management dynamics and traces the shaping of the Negro Leagues. The history of the Black Sox's home ballparks and of the people who worked for the team both on and off the field are included. Expected to be published on July 31, 2020.

Maryland Casualties in the War of 1812

The objective of this work is to identify those Maryland heroes who became casualties during the War of 1812. By definition, a casualty is a military person lost by death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action. This book is based on available records and it is not a complete list because many men who were wounded in battle in1814 treated themselves and fought on; thus, many were not recorded as such on company muster rolls. Still others would be recorded if they were unable to serve for a period of time and would be listed as sick or absent in hospital and even more men reported their wounds only when they were in the process of applying for government assistance in their old age, such as for bounty land or a pension.

What Lies Beneath

Now available only through the HSBC Library.

The Baltimore municipal water system supplies more than 1.8 million people in Baltimore City and parts of its surrounding counties. How did the reservoir system come to be? Why are the reservoirs in Baltimore County owned and managed by Baltimore City? What are the lost landscapes under Loch Raven, Prettyboy, and Liberty Reservoirs? This book tells these stories, illustrated by historic photographs, primarily from the collections of the Baltimore City Department of Public Works and the Historical Society of Baltimore County. Ann Royston Blouse and Cynthia Schäfer Mann are long-time volunteers at the Historical Society, with a collective thirty years of research experience in Baltimore County history. Buy it online here.

'The Daily Miracle': A Memoir of Newspapering

"The first half of the title of C. Fraser Smith’s new book may sound reverent--a miracle! Every day! But along with the tales of eccentric characters in the newsrooms where Smith has worked, "The Daily Miracle" offers a hint of sarcasm, plus anguish about the challenges that threaten newspapers. When papers wither, Smith says the community loses a valuable ally." - Sheilah Kast, WYPR

https://www.wypr.org/post/daily-miracle-memoir-newspapering

Baltimore Radio and Television (Images of America)

Beginning with Calman Zamoiski's unlicensed and short-lived "wireless telephone" station in 1921, Baltimore would boast five commercial radio stations within the next 20 years. Before the 1940s ended, commercial television appeared with the debut of WMAR, Channel 2, in 1947. WMAR was unique in that it had no personnel with television experience and, initially, no studios, broadcasting instead from various remote locations. Over the years, Baltimore radio and television stations served as the launchpad or stopover point of some of the most beloved personalities in the industry. Garry Moore, Arthur Godfrey, and Jim McKay all got their starts here, while Gene Rayburn, Jon Miller, Oprah Winfrey, John Saunders, Nick Charles, Spencer Christian, Bob McAllister, and others passed through en route to national broadcasting prominence. Baltimoreans did not just bond with the people and programs of their local stations. It was a genuine love affair.

Edwin Forrest: A Biography and Performance History

Edwin Forrest was the foremost American actor of the nineteenth century. His advocacy of American, and specifically Jacksonian, themes made him popular in New York’s Bowery Theatre. His rivalry with the English tragedian William Charles Macready led to the Astor Place Riot, and his divorce from Catharine Sinclair Forrest was one of the greatest social scandals of the period. This full-length biography examines Forrest’s personal life while acknowledging the impossibility of separating it from his public image. Included is a historical chronology of every known performance the actor gave. Forrest toured to Baltimore virtually every year of his professional life, playing at both the Holliday Street and Front Street Theatres. His appearances are referenced on 40 pages of the book.

A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale University, Arthur W. Bloom has served as a professor and academic administrator at Loyola University Chicago, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles; and Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. He lives in Chalfont, Pennsylvania.

Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City

Nicknamed both “Mobtown” and “Charm City” and located on the border of the North and South, Baltimore is a city of contradictions. From media depictions in The Wire to the real-life trial of police officers for the murder of Freddie Gray, Baltimore has become a quintessential example of a struggling American city. Yet the truth about Baltimore is far more complicated—and more fascinating.

All We Do is Talk Steel: Oral Histories of Sparrows Point

All We Do is Talk Steel: Oral Histories of Sparrows Point is a new collection of interviews with workers from the world’s largest steel mill which closed in 2012. These interviews emphasize the “epic civilization” of the Bethlehem Steel steelworkers, including their efforts to build a union, campaigns to bring civil rights and women’s rights into the union and the families and communities they created along the way. [26 March 2019 article from The Dundalk Eagle]

Contact Bill Barry to obtain a signed copy.

Baltimore Prohibition: Wet & Dry in the Free State

Baltimore native Michael T. Walsh, an adjunct professor of U.S. history at the Community College of Baltimore County, has published Baltimore Prohibition: Wet & Dry in the Free State. “There was perhaps no region more opposed to Prohibition than Baltimore and Maryland. The Free State was defiant in its protest from thoroughly wet Governor Albert Ritchie to esteemed Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons. Maryland was the only state to not pass a "baby" Volstead enforcement act. Speakeasies emerged at Frostburg's Gunter Hotel and at Baltimore's famed Belvedere Hotel, whose famous owls' blinking eyes would notify its patrons if it was safe to indulge in bootleg liquor. Rumrunners were frequent on the Chesapeake Bay as bootleggers populated the city streets. Journalist H.L. Mencken, known as the "Sage of Baltimore," drew national attention criticizing the new law. Author Michael T. Walsh presents this colorful history.” [Arcadia Press]

Cherry Hill: raising successful black children in jim crow baltimore

Baltimore native Linda G. Morris published Cherry Hill: Raising Successful Black Children in Jim Crow Baltimore in 2018. “Before Opie lived in Mayberry, Beaver and Wally in Mayfield, and Betty, Bud and Kathy in Springfield, there were thousands of little Black children experiencing the same quality of life in Cherry Hill, a post WWII planned suburban community containing a public housing project on a southeastern peninsula of Baltimore City. These children had a sense of being loved, being free, being safe, and above all, having the space they needed to stretch out and enjoy small town living. They could play all day with their friends, skate and ride their bikes all over town, and chase the ice cream man's truck, with the admonishment to be home by the time the streetlights came on. The author was one of those children, and she rallied sixty or so of her Cherry Hill contemporaries to share what life was like for them in what they know to be a special place and time.” (Google Books)

Old Maryland Mills, A Portfolio

“Old Maryland Mills, A Portfolio” is John McGrain’s 5th book in recent years with photos from his extensive photographic collection. Part I is a history of Maryland mills beginning in Colonial times through the 1970’s. Part II, “Album of Maryland Mills” is packed with mill photographs from Maryland Counties.
 
Old Mills is now on sale exclusively through the HSBC library. Copies may be purchased for $20 (tax included) in person or through the mail for $20 plus $5 shipping and handling.

Baltimore: A Political History Hardcover  by Matthew A. Crenson

Charm City or Mobtown? People from Baltimore glory in its eccentric charm, small-town character, and North-cum-South culture. But for much of the nineteenth century, violence and disorder plagued the city. More recently, the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody has prompted Baltimoreans―and the entire nation―to focus critically on the rich and tangled narrative of black–white relations in Baltimore, where slavery once existed alongside the largest community of free blacks in the United States.

Matthew A. Crenson, a distinguished political scientist and Baltimore native, examines the role of politics and race throughout Baltimore’s history. From its founding in 1729 up through the recent past, Crenson follows Baltimore’s political evolution from an empty expanse of marsh and hills to a complicated city with distinct ways of doing business. Revealing how residents at large engage (and disengage) with one another across an expansive agenda of issues and conflicts, Crenson shows how politics helped form this complex city’s personality.

Crenson provocatively argues that Baltimore’s many quirks are likely symptoms of urban underdevelopment. The city’s longtime domination by the general assembly―and the corresponding weakness of its municipal authority―forced residents to adopt the private and extra-governmental institutions that shaped early Baltimore. On the one hand, Baltimore was resolutely parochial, split by curious political quarrels over issues as minor as loose pigs. On the other, it was keenly attuned to national politics: during the Revolution, for instance, Baltimoreans were known for their comparative radicalism. Crenson describes how, as Baltimore and the nation grew, whites competed with blacks, slave and free, for menial and low-skill work. He also explores how the urban elite thrived by avoiding, wherever possible, questions of slavery vs. freedom―just as, long after the Civil War and emancipation, wealthier Baltimoreans preferred to sidestep racial controversy.

Peering into the city’s 300-odd neighborhoods, this fascinating account holds up a mirror to Baltimore, asking whites in particular to re-examine the past and accept due responsibility for future racial progress.

Baltimore Prohibition: Wet and Dry in the Free State by Michael T. Walsh  

There was perhaps no region more opposed to Prohibition than Baltimore and Maryland. The Free State was defiant in its protest from thoroughly wet Governor Albert Ritchie to esteemed Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons. Maryland was the only state to not pass a "baby" Volstead enforcement act. Speakeasies emerged at Frostburg's Gunter Hotel and at Baltimore's famed Belvedere Hotel, whose famous owls' blinking eyes would notify its patrons if it was safe to indulge in bootleg liquor. Rumrunners were frequent on the Chesapeake Bay as bootleggers populated the city streets. Journalist H.L. Mencken, known as the "Sage of Baltimore," drew national attention criticizing the new law. Author Michael T. Walsh presents this colorful history.

Flickering Treasures: Rediscovering Baltimore's Forgotten Movie Theaters by Amy Davis and Barry Levinson

Baltimore has been home to hundreds of theaters since the first moving pictures flickered across muslin sheets. These monuments to popular culture, adorned with grandiose architectural flourishes, seemed an everlasting part of Baltimore’s landscape. By 1950, when the city’s population peaked, Baltimore’s movie fans could choose from among 119 theaters. But by 2016, the number of cinemas had dwindled to only three. Today, many of the city’s theaters are boarded up, even burned out, while others hang on with varying degrees of dignity as churches or stores.

In Flickering Treasures, Amy Davis, an award-winning photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun, pairs vintage black-and-white images of opulent downtown movie palaces and modest neighborhood theaters with her own contemporary full-color photographs, inviting us to imagine Charm City’s past as we confront today’s neglected urban landscape. Punctuated by engaging stories and interviews with local moviegoers, theater owners, ushers, and cashiers, plus commentary from celebrated Baltimore filmmakers Barry Levinson and John Waters, the book brings each theater and decade vividly to life.

From Electric Park, the Century, and the Hippodrome to the Royal, the Parkway, the Senator, and scores of other beloved venues, the book delves into Baltimore’s history, including its troubling legacy of racial segregation. The descriptions of the technological and cultural changes that have shaped both American cities and the business of movie exhibition will trigger affectionate memories for many readers. A map and timeline reveal the one-time presence of movie houses in every corner of the city, and fact boxes include the years of operation, address, architect, and seating capacity for each of the 72 theaters profiled, along with a brief description of each theater’s distinct character.

Highlighting the emotional resonance of film and the loyalty of Baltimoreans to their neighborhoods, Flickering Treasures is a profound story of change, loss, and rebirth.

The Streak: Lou Gehrig, Cal Ripken Jr., and Baseball's Most Historic Record by John Eisenberg

The fascinating story of baseball’s legendary “Ironmen,” two players from different eras who each achieved the coveted and sometimes confounding record of most consecutive games played

When Cal Ripken Jr. began his career with the Baltimore Orioles at age twenty-one, he had no idea he would someday beat the historic record of playing 2,130 games in a row, a record set forty-two years before by the fabled “Iron Horse” of the New York Yankees, Lou Gehrig. Ripken went on to surpass that record by 502 games, and the baseball world was floored. Few feats in sports history have generated more acclaim. But the record spawns an array of questions. When did someone first think it was a good idea to play in so many games without taking a day off? Who owned the record before Gehrig? Whose streak—Gehrig’s or Ripken’s—was the more difficult achievement?

 Through probing research, meticulous analysis, and colorful parallel storytelling, The Streak delves into this impressive but controversial milestone, unraveling Gehrig’s at-times unwitting pursuit of that goal (Babe Ruth used to think Gehrig crazy for wanting to play every game), and Ripken’s fierce determination to stay in the lineup and continue to contribute whatever he could even as his skills diminished with age.

 The question looms: How do these streaks compare? There were so many factors: the length of seasons, the number of teams in the major leagues, the inclusion of nonwhite players, travel, technology, medical advances, and even media are all part of the equation. This is a book that captures the deeply American appreciation—as seen in the sport itself—for a workaday mentality and that desire to be there for the game every time it called.

Your Maryland: Little-Known Histories from the Shores of the Chesapeake to the Foothills of the Allegheny Mountains by Ric Cottom

"Good evening, I’m Ric Cottom. Welcome to Your Maryland." Since 2002, when he first delivered his now-classic radio segment on Maryland history, Ric Cottom has narrated hundreds of little-known human interest stories. Collected here are 72 of his favorite on-air pieces, enhanced with beautiful papercut illustrations by Baltimore artist Annie Howe. From accused witches and the murderous career of gunsmith John Dandy through tales of Johnny U and the greatest game ever played, Your Maryland covers nearly four centuries of the Free State’s heroes and scoundrels.

Entertaining listeners of all ages while sparking their interest in the past, Cottom’s beloved Your Maryland is a unique blend of carefully researched regional history and narrative nonfiction. He deftly emphasizes the human dimension of Maryland’s colorful past: its athletes (two- and four-legged), beautiful spies, brilliant writers, misunderstood pirates, and ghosts. All of that color, suspense, and humor―as well as the author’s unusual talent for discovering interesting historical facts and personages―is part of your Maryland.

John W. Garrett and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad by Kathleen Waters Sander  

Chartered in 1827 as the country’s first railroad, the legendary Baltimore and Ohio played a unique role in the nation’s great railroad drama and became the model for American railroading. John W. Garrett, who served as president of the B&O from 1858 to 1884, ranked among the great power brokers of the time. In this gripping and well-researched account, historian Kathleen Waters Sander tells the story of the B&O’s beginning and its unprecedented plan to build a rail line from Baltimore over the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River, considered to be the most ambitious engineering feat of its time. The B&O’s success ignited "railroad fever" and helped to catapult railroading to America’s most influential industry in the nineteenth century.

Taking the B&O helm during the railroads’ expansive growth in the 1850s, Garrett soon turned his attention to the demands of the Civil War. Sander explains how, despite suspected Southern sympathies, Garrett became one of President Abraham Lincoln's most trusted confidantes and strategists, making the B&O available for transporting Northern troops and equipment to critical battles. The Confederates attacked the B&O 143 times, but could not put "Mr. Lincoln’s Road" out of business. After the war, Garrett became one of the first of the famed Gilded Age tycoons, rising to unimagined power and wealth. Sander explores how―when he was not fighting fierce railroad wars with competitors―Garrett steered the B&O into highly successful entrepreneurial endeavors, quadrupling track mileage to reach important commercial markets, jumpstarting Baltimore’s moribund postwar economy, and constructing lavish hotels in Western Maryland to open tourism in the region.

Sander brings to life the brazen risk-taking, clashing of oversized egos, and opulent lifestyles of the Gilded Age tycoons in this richly illustrated portrait of one man’s undaunted efforts to improve the B&O and advance its technology. Chronicling the epic technological transformations of the nineteenth century, from rudimentary commercial trade and primitive transportation westward to the railroads’ indelible impact on the country and the economy, John W. Garrett and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is a vivid account of Garrett’s twenty-six-year reign.

Soldiers, Spies & Steam: A History of the Northern Central Railway in the Civil by Scott Mingus  

The first book to examine the role of the Northern Central Railway during the Civil War, this work discusses the origins of the NCRW, its route structure, destructive Confederate raids at the start of the war, and the troops who rode the rails. President Lincoln used the Northern Central to travel to and from Gettysburg for the dedication of the National Cemetery; his brief remarks are immortalized as the Gettysburg Address. His funeral train would also pass over the same route. Accidents, spies, sabotage, political intrigue, and the expansion of the railroad as a military and economic necessity form the backbone of the book. Of special interest is a detailed examination of a series of controversial photographs taken at Hanover Junction, Pennsylvania, which may or may not show Abraham Lincoln on his way to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

Baltimore City Police History: A Historical Timeline by Kenny James Driscoll Sr,‎  Wesley Wise (Editor)

A book about the history of the Baltimore Police Department, from start to present. This is done in a yearly timeline, followed by a day-to-day timeline.

Musical Maryland: A History of Song and Performance from the Colonial Period to the Age of Radio by David K. Hildebrand, Elizabeth M. Schaaf

In Musical Maryland, the first comprehensive survey of the music emanating from the Old Line State, David K. Hildebrand and Elizabeth M. Schaaf explore the myriad ways in which music has enriched the lives of Marylanders. From the drinking songs of colonial Annapolis, the liturgical music of the Zion Lutheran Church, and the work songs of the tobacco fields to the exuberant marches of late nineteenth-century Baltimore Orioles festivals, Chick Webb’s mastery on drums, and the triumphs of the Baltimore Opera Society, this richly illustrated volume explores more than 300 years of Maryland’s music history.

Beginning with early compositions performed in private settings and in public concerts, this book touches on the development of music clubs like the Tuesday Club, the Florestan Society, and H. L. Mencken’s Saturday Night Club, as well as lasting institutions such as the Peabody Institute and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Yet the soundscape also includes militia quicksteps, sea chanteys, and other work songs. The book describes the writing of "The Star-Spangled Banner"―perhaps Maryland's single greatest contribution to the nation's musical history. It chronicles the wide range of music created and performed by Maryland’s African American musicians along Pennsylvania Avenue in racially segregated Baltimore, from jazz to symphonic works. It also tells the true story of a deliberately integrated concert that the BSO staged at the end of World War II.

The book is full of musical examples, engravings, paintings, drawings, and historic photographs that not only portray the composers and performers but also the places around the state in which music flourished. Illuminating sidebars by William Biehl focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century song of the kind evoked by the USS Baltimore or inspired by the state's history, natural beauty, and romantic steamboats. The book also offers a sampling of the tunes that Maryland’s more remarkable composers and performers, including Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, and Cab Calloway, contributed to American music before the homogenization that arrived in earnest after World War II.

Bringing to life not only portraits of musicians, composers, and conductors whose stories and recollections are woven into the fabric of this book, but also musical scores and concert halls, Musical Maryland is an engaging, authoritative, and bold look at an endlessly compelling subject.

Two against Lincoln: Reverdy Johnson and Horatio Seymour, Champions of the Loyal Opposition by William C. Harris

Reverdy Johnson (1796–1876), Maryland senator, and Horatio Seymour, Democratic governor of New York, were two influential opponents of Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans during the Civil War. But unlike the Copperheads, they staunchly supported the war to suppress the rebellion. The story of these two figures of the loyal opposition by Lincoln Prize-winning author William C. Harris provides a new way of understanding critical controversies relating to the purpose of the Civil War, its conduct, emancipation, white racial opinion, loyalty, military conscription, and civil liberties.

Johnson, a distinguished lawyer, former Whig, and conservative Unionist, did not believe that the secessionist states had left the Union, an idea with broad implications for post-war reconstruction. Like Seymour, he opposed Republican efforts in Washington to end slavery, assuming such a policy would backfire against the Union. However, Johnson in 1864 spoke in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. Before the war, Seymour supported Stephen Douglas's popular sovereignty policies, allowing the territories to decide whether or not to permit slavery, and during the war he opposed any tampering with slavery. Two Against Lincoln explores how these two men negotiated issues of emancipation, reconstruction, and reconciliation, all while navigating the roiling currents of partisan politics. The book includes illuminating accounts of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, the ephemeral National Union (Democratic) Party of 1866, the role of Senator Johnson in the approval of the military reconstruction acts of 1867, the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, and, finally, the presidential election of 1868 in which Seymour as the Democratic candidate did better than expected against war hero U. S. Grant.

Building on the author’s award winning work on Lincoln and the border states, Two Against Lincoln illustrates the complexity of political divisions in the Union states, as embodied in two powerful, controversial leaders of the time.

The No. 26 Sparrows Point Line: Chronicles of the Red Rocket (1903 – 1958) by Elmer Hall

This book details the No. 26 Sparrows Point Streetcar Line. It includes an overview of all the routes that the Sparrows Point line utilized over its entire history. These include the old Point Breeze line over Colgate Creek, the Howard and Franklin Streets Route, the Fayette and Pearl Streets route via Fayette Street, the Fayette and Pearl Streets via Lombard Street, Pratt and Grundy to Sparrows Point, the Fort Howard Line and the route to Bay Shore. The route proceeds across Fairmount Avenue to Pratt and Grundy. it continues out of the Eastern Ave underpass to Dundalk Ave. From there it proceeds south on Dundalk Ave crossing the Bear Creek drawbridge before entering the shipyard at Sparrows Point. It proceeds on to the town of Sparrows Point and Sparrows Point Station.

Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy by Andrew Morton

Before she became known as the woman who enticed a king from his throne and birthright, Bessie Wallis Warfield was a prudish and particular girl from Baltimore. At turns imaginative, ambitious, and spoiled, Wallis's first words as recalled by her family were "me, me." From that young age, she was in want of nothing but stability, status, and social acceptance as she fought to climb the social ladder and take her place in London society. As irony would have it, she would gain the love and devotion of a king, but only at the cost of his throne and her reputation.

In WALLIS IN LOVE, acclaimed biographer Andrew Morton offers a fresh portrait of Wallis Simpson in all her vibrancy and brazenness as she transformed from a hard-nosed gold-digger to charming chatelaine. Using diary entries, letters, and other never-before-seen records, Morton takes us through Wallis's romantic adventures in Washington, China, and her entrance into the strange wonderland that is London society. During her journey, we meet an extraordinary array of characters, many of whom smoothed the way for her dalliance with the king of England, Edward VIII.

WALLIS IN LOVE goes beyond Wallis's infamous persona and reveals a complex, domineering woman striving to determine her own fate and grapple with matters of the heart.

Health and Humanity: A History of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 1935-1985 by Karen Kruse Thomas

Between 1935 and 1985, the nascent public health profession developed scientific evidence and practical know-how to prevent death on an unprecedented scale. Thanks to public health workers, life expectancy rose rapidly as generations grew up free from the scourges of smallpox, typhoid, and syphilis. In Health and Humanity, Karen Kruse Thomas offers a thorough account of the growth of academic public health in the United States through the prism of the oldest and largest independent school of public health in the world. Thomas follows the transformation of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (JHSPH), now known as the Bloomberg School of Public Health, from a small, private institute devoted to doctoral training and tropical disease research into a leading global educator and innovator in fields from biostatistics to mental health to pathobiology.

A provocative, wide-ranging account of how midcentury public health leveraged federal grants and anti-Communist fears to build the powerful institutional networks behind the health programs of the CDC, WHO, and USAID, the book traces how Johns Hopkins helped public health take center stage during the scientific research boom triggered by World War II. It also examines the influence of politics on JHSPH, the school’s transition to federal grant funding, the globalization of public health in response to hot and cold war influences, and the expansion of the school’s teaching program to encompass social science as well as lab science.

Revealing how faculty members urged foreign policy makers to include saving lives in their strategy of "winning hearts and minds," Thomas argues that the growth of chronic disease and the loss of Rockefeller funds moved the JHSPH toward international research funded by the federal government, creating a situation in which it was sometimes easier for the school to improve the health of populations in India and Turkey than on its own doorstep in East Baltimore. Health and Humanity is a comprehensive account of the ways that JHSPH has influenced the practice, pedagogy, and especially our very understanding of public health on both global and local scales.

Baltimore Memories: A Pictorial History of the mid 1800s through the 1930s  by The Baltimore Sun Media Group & Enoch Pratt Free Library

The Baltimore Sun Media Group, in partnership with Enoch Pratt Free Library, is pleased to present this hardcover coffee-table book, "Baltimore Memories: A Pictorial History of the 1800s through the 1930s." This heirloom-quality, 168-page book features a glimpse of life in and around Baltimore in stunning historic photos from the archives of the Sun and Enoch Pratt Free Library. We are thrilled to also include historic photos from our readers.

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Justice, Power, and Politics) by Adam Malka

What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality.

Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the "new Jim Crow" are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.

Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball's Campaign Against Its Biggest Star (Sports and American Culture) by Edmund F. Wehrle

Rather than as a Falstaffian figure of limited intellect, Edmund Wehrle reveals Babe Ruth as an ambitious, independent operator, one not afraid to challenge baseball’s draconian labor system. To the baseball establishment, Ruth’s immense popularity represented opportunity, but his rebelliousness and potential to overturn the status quo presented a threat. After a decades-long campaign waged by baseball to contain and discredit him, the Babe, frustrated and struggling with injuries and illness, grew more acquiescent, but the image of Ruth that baseball perpetuated still informs how many people remember him to this day. This new perspective, approaching Ruth more seriously and placing his life in fuller context, is long overdue.

A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure: The Remarkable Lives of George A. Lucas and His Art Collection by Stanley Mazaroff

In 1857, George A. Lucas, a young Baltimorean who was fluent in French and enamored of French art, arrived in Paris. There, he established an extensive personal network of celebrated artists and art dealers, becoming the quintessential French connection for American collectors. The most remarkable thing about Lucas was not the art that he acquired for his clients (who included William and Henry Walters, the founders of the Walters Art Museum, and John Taylor Johnston, the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) but the massive collection of 18,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and etchings, as well as 1,500 books, journals, and other sources about French artists, that he acquired for himself. Paintings by Cabanel, Corot, and Daubigny, prints by Whistler, Manet, and Cassatt, and portfolios of information about hundreds of French artists filled his apartment and spilled into the adjacent flat of his mistress.

Based primarily on Lucas’s notes and diaries, as well as thousands of other archival documents, Stanley Mazaroff’s A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure tells the fascinating story of how Lucas brought together the most celebrated French artists with the most prominent and wealthy American collectors of the time. It also details how, nearing the end of his life, Lucas struggled to find a future home for his collection, eventually giving it to Baltimore’s Maryland Institute. Without the means to care for the collection, the Institute loaned it to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where most of the art was placed in storage and disappeared from public view. But in 1990, when the Institute proposed to auction or otherwise sell the collection, it rose from obscurity, reached new glory as an irreplaceable cultural treasure, and became the subject of an epic battle fought in and out of court that captivated public attention and enflamed the passions of art lovers and museum officials across the nation.

On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore by Eric L. Goldstein, and Deborah R. Weiner

In 1938, Gustav Brunn and his family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Baltimore. Brunn found a job at McCormick’s Spice Company but was fired after three days when, according to family legend, the manager discovered he was Jewish. He started his own successful business using a spice mill he brought over from Germany and developed a blend especially for the seafood purveyors across the street. Before long, his Old Bay spice blend would grace kitchen cabinets in virtually every home in Maryland. The Brunns sold the business in 1986. Four years later, Old Bay was again sold―to McCormick.

In On Middle Ground, the first truly comprehensive history of Baltimore’s Jewish community, Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner describe not only the formal institutions of Jewish life but also the everyday experiences of families like the Brunns and of a diverse Jewish population that included immigrants and natives, factory workers and department store owners, traditionalists and reformers. The story of Baltimore Jews―full of absorbing characters and marked by dramas of immigration, acculturation, and assimilation―is the story of American Jews in microcosm. But its contours also reflect the city’s unique culture.

Goldstein and Weiner argue that Baltimore’s distinctive setting as both a border city and an immigrant port offered opportunities for advancement that made it a magnet for successive waves of Jewish settlers. The authors detail how the city began to attract enterprising merchants during the American Revolution, when it thrived as one of the few ports remaining free of British blockade. They trace Baltimore’s meteoric rise as a commercial center, which drew Jewish newcomers who helped the upstart town surpass Philadelphia as the second-largest American city. They explore the important role of Jewish entrepreneurs as Baltimore became a commercial gateway to the South and later developed a thriving industrial scene.

Readers learn how, in the twentieth century, the growth of suburbia and the redevelopment of downtown offered scope to civic leaders, business owners, and real estate developers. From symphony benefactor Joseph Meyerhoff to Governor Marvin Mandel and trailblazing state senator Rosalie Abrams, Jews joined the ranks of Baltimore’s most influential cultural, philanthropic, and political leaders while working on the grassroots level to reshape a metro area confronted with the challenges of modern urban life.

Accessibly written and enriched by more than 130 illustrations, On Middle Ground reveals that local Jewish life was profoundly shaped by Baltimore’s "middleness"―its hybrid identity as a meeting point between North and South, a major industrial center with a legacy of slavery, and a large city with a small-town feel.