The center of Boston, with skyscrapers and row houses, looks like Baltimore. But 99% of Boston’s neighborhoods look really different. To find out why, Charlie Duff, former BAF President and author of The North Atlantic Cities, shows how the building cultures of the two cities came to be what they are – and how two “Men with a Mission” succeeded, and failed, to change the way the people of their cultures built houses.

Through her Virtual Histories webinar Being Literate, Being Free, Dr. Joanne Martin will highlight historical personalities for whom literacy was the key to a future of freedom and hope for a people who were coming to understand that “If you would keep a people enslaved, refuse to teach them to read”.

Have you ever noticed the fading signs painted on buildings all around Baltimore and wondered what they used to say or why they were on a certain building? They are called ghost signs and photographer Lashelle Bynum has been meticulously researching and documenting them over the last few decades. She has photographed nearly 300 ghost signs in Baltimore to date. Please join us to hear Lashelle talk about her quest to discover and uncover the history of Baltimore's ghost signs.

On April 28, join historian and author Ev Paull as he discusses his book, Stop the Road, an up-close-and-personal account of Baltimore's epic 40-year battle over expressway plans. Meet the unsung heroes, a ragtag band of neighborhood activists, preservationists, and environmentalists who saved Baltimore from its own leadership, thereby protecting Baltimore's historic waterfront communities of Federal Hill, Fell's Point, and Canton. But that glorious and unlikely win must be tempered with the equally compelling but inglorious story behind the disastrous Highway to Nowhere. This is Baltimore unmasked and laid threadbare for the most momentous decisions since the building of the B&O Railroad.