For your long-weekend reading, here is a collection of short pieces — many from our Lab members and our colleagues at the SNF Agora Institute — that we’ve been looking forward to get to. — MSJ
“Indigenous Diplomacy, Erasure, and the British Connection” from Spring-Summer 2023 lab member and PhD Candidate in History Emma Katherine Bilski over the the North American Conference on British Studies blog, Broadsides.
Bilski writes: Adorning the street-level façade of the Lord Baltimore Hotel is a pair of stone medallions, repeated over and over around the building. The European face is that of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, according to his facial hair and to the Historic Hotels of America website. The identity of the Native American man shown in these stone medallions is more ambiguous.
“Maryland Has Hundreds of Historical Markers. Many Don’t Tell the Whole Story” from SNF Agora Institute Visiting Fellow Rona Kobell for the Baltimore Banner.
Kobell explains: Maryland roads include more than 700 historical markers commemorating famous battles and buildings. … What they share is that many fail to convey the whole story. They’re not supposed to; at 70 words apiece, the idea is to whet an appetite to learn more. Yet a motorist might well learn the wrong information.
“Enslaved African Americans in Maryland Linked to 42,000 Living Relatives” from Carl Zimmer at The New York Times. H/T to Professor Kyle W. Cunningham of the JHU Department of Biology for bringing this to our attention.
Zimmer reveals: A construction team working on a highway expansion in Maryland in 1979 discovered human remains on the grounds of an 18th-century ironworks. Eventually, archaeologists uncovered 35 graves in a cemetery where enslaved people had been buried. In the first effort of its kind, researchers now have linked DNA from 27 African Americans buried in the cemetery to nearly 42,000 living relatives. Almost 3,000 of them are so closely related that some people might be direct descendants.
From journalist and 2019-20 SNF Agora Institute Visiting Fellow Scott Shane, Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland, new from Celadon Books.
Shane discovers: Born into slavery in Maryland, Thomas Smallwood by the 1840s was free, self-educated, and working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. He recruited a young white activist, Charles Torrey, and together they began to organize mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties to freedom in the north.
Finally, a feature from the Johns Hopkins University Arts & Sciences Magazine on our work at Hard Histories, “Footprints from the Past.”
The Magazine explains: With doctoral candidate Emma Katherine Bilski as their guide, a cadre of undergraduates set out on a walking tour in Baltimore last spring. Their mission? To follow in the footsteps of the girls and young women who lived and worked in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum (JHH COA) nearly 150 years ago.
Until next time!
__ MSJ