Baltimore Heritage

Anne Sarah Rubin discusses her digital project "Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore." This website allows users to virtually stroll the streets of Baltimore circa 1815, while exploring the lives of free blacks and enslaved workers. She will also discuss the on-line games her students made about the Pratt Street Riots of 1861, suggesting some of the ways that modern technology can reconstruct the past in newly engaging ways.

Shaping public space comes with a special responsibility. Architects, planners, and designers must examine the impacts—both positive and negative—of public improvements on all members of a community and be intentional about how their efforts can create better experiences for all, today and tomorrow. With a commitment to crafting equitable and collaboratively-designed projects, Mahan Rykiel Associates approached the redesign of Rash Field Park with intention and sensitivity. By first examining the context and histories around Baltimore’s Rash Field Park and the surrounding Inner Harbor, then deploying a many-layered engagement strategy that prioritized outreach to underserved and underrepresented communities, Mahan Rykiel Associates was able to set the stage for shaping Rash Field as a public space for all people—a park that could be enjoyed by visitors, but, first and foremost, a park that would be cherished, celebrated, and enjoyed by the neighbors and residents of Baltimore City.

From the late 1800s until the modern era, Black Baltimoreans have faced and challenged race-based housing discrimination and governmental redlining. This historic discrimination greatly affected community growth and the socio-economic advancement of Black Baltimoreans. Yet, Black Baltimoreans today are still suffering from the effects of housing discrimination. Join Alexander Lothstein from the Maryland Center for History and Culture as he discusses the history of housing discrimination and challenges against it in Baltimore.

The talk will explore the growth of the domestic slave trade in Baltimore, the various methods and locations of sale, and some of the more notorious traders in the business of selling people.