Difference between revisions of "Baltimore"

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Baltimore is the largest city in the state of Maryland, the 19th largest in the United States, It is part of the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area.^[1]

Baltimore was settled in the early 17th century and founded as a town in 1729. It was named after Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland. In recent decades the redevelopment of the Inner Harbor, and the gentrification of rundown neighborhoods have been major factors in Baltimore's resurgence.

The 2008 population of the city was 637,000; Baltimore County had 786,000. The Baltimore Metropolitan Area had 2.7 million residents, making it the 20th largest in the country. The Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area has a population of 8.3 million.

People

The city's s population is nearly 60% black and also includes many people of Italian, German, and central European ancestry. From the 1840s to the 1950s the citry was dominated by German Americans.

Industry

Baltimore was the first city to use manufactured coal gas for energy following the creation of the Gas Light Company of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1816. Thereafter, gas plants were developed throughout the United States.

From 1860 to 1960, Baltimore was an important center of the men's ready-to-wear clothing industries. German-speaking Jews created many businesses that manufactured and sold underwear, men's suits, and specialty items such as hats and umbrellas. The most prominent Jewish businessmen operated at the retail level: Hutzler's, Hochschild Kohn's, and Hechts's were the city's major department stores from the late 19th century through the 1970s.

Education

The new Maryland state constitution of 1864 ended slavery and provided for the education of all children, including blacks. The Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People established schools for blacks that were taken over by the public school system, which then restricted education for blacks beginning in 1867 when Democrats regained control of the city. Establishing an unequal system that prepared white students for citizenship while using education to reinforce black subjugation, Baltimore's postwar school system exposed the contradictions of race, education, and republicanism in an age when African Americans struggled to realize the ostensible freedoms gained by emancipation.^[2]

Higher culture

Baltimore is the site of the Johns Hopkins University (1876), a premier research institution best known for its medical school. Other notable schools are the College of Notre Dame of Maryland (1873), Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University (formerly the Peabody Conservatory of Music; founded 1857), and Goucher College (1885) in suburban Towson. Much of the work of higher education is done by the University of Maryland-Baltimore, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the University of Maryland, and Towson State University. Morgan State University is a historically black school. The Baltimore Museum of Art, the Peale Museum, and the Walters Art Gallery have notable collections of art, and the B & O Railroad Museum houses an impressive collection of railroad memorabilia. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, founded in the 1990s, attempts a 'balancing act' by highlighting the importance, endurance, and vitality of African American history and culture, while emphasizing the destructive effects of slavery and racism. The Morris Mechanic Theater, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Opera Company, and Fort McHenry (its successful defense against the British in 1814, inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner") are other major attractions. Nearby Pimlico Race Track is the site of the Preakness Stakes, a major event in horse racing. Druid Hill Park contains the city zoo and a natural history museum. The U.S.S. Constellation, launched in 1854 is a major tourist attraction in the harbor.

Parks

The story of the Patapsco Forest Reserve (later renamed the Patapsco Valley State Park) near Baltimore reveals notable connections between the Progressive-era movements for forest conservation and urban park planning. In 1903, the Patapsco Valley site, although outside the city boundary, was nevertheless identified by the Olmstead Brothers landscape architecture firm as an ideal site to acquire property for future park development. At the same time, the Maryland State Board of Forestry, seeking to establish scientific forestry research, received donated land for this purpose in the Patapsco Valley. Over subsequent decades, a powerful alliance of urban elites, state managers, and city officials assembled thousands of acres along the Patapsco River. The site evolved into a unique hybrid of forest preserve and public park that reflected both its location on the urban fringe and its dual heritage in the conservation and parks movements.^[3]

History

The 1790s were hard times for the city. The Bank of England's suspension of specie payments caused the network of Atlantic credit to unravel, leading to a mild recession. The Quasi-War with France in 1798-1800 caused major disruptions to Baltimore's trade in the Caribbean. Finally, a yellow fever epidemic diverted ships from the port, while much of the urban population fled into the countryside. The downturn widened to include every social class and area of economic activity. In response the business community diversified away from an economy based heavily on foreign trade.^[4]

Blacks

From the late 1700s into the 1820s Baltimore was a "city of transients," a fast-growing boom town attracting thousands of ex-slaves from the surrounding countryside. Slavery in Maryland declined steadily after the 1810s as the state's economy shifted away from plantation agriculture, as evangelicalism and a liberal manumission law encouraged owners to liberate those in bondage, and as other masters practiced "term slavery," registering deeds of manumission but postponing the actual date of freedom for a decade or more. Baltimore's shrinking slave population often lived and worked alongside the city's growing free black population as "quasi-freedmen." With unskilled and semiskilled employment readily available, particularly in the shipyards and related industries, little friction with white workers occurred. Despite the overall poverty of the city's free blacks, compared with the condition of those living in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans, Baltimore was a "city of refuge," where slave and free black alike found an unusual amount of freedom. Churches, schools, and fraternal and benevolent associations provided a cushion against hardening white attitudes toward free blacks in the wake of Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in 1831. But a flood of German and Irish immigrants swamped Baltimore's labor market after 1840, driving free blacks deeper into poverty.^[5]

Civil War

Baltimore was torn by the Civil War. Much of the social and political elite favored the Confederacy--and indeed owned house slaves. However the fierce politics of the 1850s had galvanized the white workers, most of them German, who opposed slavery. working-class political consciousness to the workplace and deftly reconstructs the breakdown of what he terms urban paternalism over the antebellum decades. Baltimore in the Third Party System had two-party competitive elections, with powerful bosses, carefully orchestrated political violence, and an emerging working-class consciousness at the polls. The American Party emerged in the mid 1850s to represent Protestants and to counter the Democratic Party, which was increasingly controlled by Catholic Irish. When Baltimore erupted in violence at the time of Lincoln's inauguration, for example, the pro-Union "Blood Tubs" that took to the streets were veterans of political rioting.^[6]

In the 1860 election the city's large German element voted not for Lincoln but for Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge. They were less concerned with the abolition of slavery, an issue emphasized by Republicans, and much more with nativism, temperance, and religious beliefs, associated with the Know-Nothing Party and strongly opposed by the Democrats.

When Massachusetts troops marched through the city on April 19, 1861, en route to Washington, a rebel mob attacked; 4 soldiers and 12 rioters were dead, and 36 soldiers and uncounted rioters had been injured. Governor Thomas Hicks realized action was needed. He convened a special session of the General Assembly but moved its location to a site in Frederick, a distance from the secessionist groups. In doing this and by other actions, Hicks managed to neutralize the General Assembly to avoid Maryland's secession from the Union, becoming a hero in the eyes of the Unionists in the state. Meanwhile pro-Confederate gangs burned the bridges connecting Baltimore and Washington to the North, and cut the telegraph lines. Lincoln sent in federal troops under Gen. Ben Butler; they seized the city, imposed martial law, and arrested leading Confederate spokesmen. The prisoners were later released and the rail lines reopened, making Baltimore a major Union base during the war.

Gilded Age

Expanded economic activity brought many immigrants from the countryside and from Europe after the Civil War. Concerns for young, single Protestant women alone in cities led to the growth of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) movement. Given the practice of segregation in Baltimore, however, two YWCA's emerged, the (white) Baltimore YWCA founded in 1883 and the Colored YWCA founded in 1896. They merged in 1920.

Progressive era

Political reform began in 1895 with the defeat of the Arthur Gorman-Isaac Freeman Rasin Democratic machine. The great fire of 1904 destroyed 70 blocks and 1,526 buildings in the downtown, and led to systematic urban renewal programs.

Baltimore was a poorly managed city in 1890, despite its economic vitality. Already Boston, Chicago, and New York were moving to modernize their public works infrastructures and to support the construction of capital-intensive, technologically sophisticated sewer and water supply systems. Baltimore lagged behind the other American metropolises because of its culture of privatism and the politicization of its municipal administration. However, during the 1890-1920 period the city responded to the same concerns as Chicago, New York, and Boston. The increase in urban crises, particularly the 1904 fire and the deterioration of sanitary conditions, prompted demands for reform. Moreover, the municipal administration underwent a process of moralization and professionalization in the 1900s. Afterward, Baltimore modeled itself on the other American metropolises and chose to modernize its institutions and address the industrial and urban challenges of the era.

Recent

Durr (2003) explains the defection of white working-class voters in Baltimore to the Republican Party as being caused by their fears that the Democratic Party's desegregation policies posed a threat to their families, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

Religion

Baltimore has long been a major center of the Catholic Church. Important bishops include John Carroll (1735-1815, in office 1789-1815), Francis Kenrick (1796- 1863, in office 1851-65), and especially James Cardinal Gibbons (1834—1921, in office 1877-1921).

In 1806-21 Catholics constructed the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, based on a neoclassical design by Benjamin Henry Latrobe. A $34-million restoration was based on Latrobe's original plans and was completed in 2006.

The Methodists were well received in Maryland in the 1760-1840 era, and Baltimore became an important center.^[7] Sutton (1998) looks at Methodist artisans and craftsmen, showing they embraced an evangelical identity, Protestant ethic, and complex organizational structure. This enabled them to express their anti-elitist or populist "producerist" values of self-discipline, honesty, frugality, and industry; they denounced greed, and sought an interdependent common good. Such producerist views drew on aspects of the Wesleyan ethic, appropriated the commonweal traditions of eighteenth-century republicanism, and initially resisted those of classical liberal, individualistic, self-interested capitalism. They also accorded well with and helped produce the emerging amalgam of American populist, restorationist, biblicistic, revivalistic activism that Sutton terms "Arminianized Calvinism."

Inside the Methodist Church the artisans were reforemers who focused on three substantive and symbolic targets, each of which would democratize Methodist conferences: lay suffrage and representation; inclusion of the local preachers, who constituted two-thirds of Methodist leadership; and election of the officers who carried the administrative, personnel, and supervisory power, the presiding elders. The appeals made on behalf of these democratizations, Sutton shows, drew imaginatively on both producerist and Wesleyan rhetoric. By the 1850s Sutton shows that the corporate ideals and individual disciplines of religious producerism were expressed in trade unionism, in evangelical missions to workers, in factory preaching, in workers' congregations, in temperance and Sabbatarianism, in the Sunday school movement, and in the politics of Protestant communal hegemony.

Scandals

Mayor Sheila Dixon, a Democrat, was forced to resign in 2010 as part of a plea bargain; already convicted of a misdemeanor for stealing donated gift cards intended for poor children, she was facing yet another trial on perjury charges.

Famous sons and daughters

• Spiro Agnew, Republican who was Baltimore's county executive (1962-66), and vice president under Richard Nixon (1969-73), when he was forced to resign because he was still taking bribes from Baltimore clients.
• James Cardinal Gibbons, Catholic archbishop 1877-1921).
• Edgar Allan Poe (born 1809 in Boston) died and was buried in Baltimore in 1849.

See also

• Johns Hopkins University

Further reading

• Argersinger, Jo Ann E.
• Argersinger, Jo Ann E. Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939 (1999) 229 pp.
• Bilhartz, Terry D. Urban Religion and the Second Great Awakening: Church and Society in Early National Baltimore
• Durr, Kenneth D. Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (2003)
• Elfenbein, Jessica I.The Making of a Modern City: Philanthropy, Civic Culture, and the Baltimore YMCA (2001) 192 pp.
• Hayward, Mary Ellen and Shivers, Frank R., Jr., eds. The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History (2004). 408 pp.
• Phillips, Christopher. Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (1997)
• Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009), 368 pp. social history online review
• Steffen, Charles. Mechanics of Baltimore
• Sutton, William R. Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (1998) 351 pp. [www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=3302 online review]

references

1. ↑ The city is entirely separate from Baltimore County.
2. ↑ Robert S. Wolff, "The Problem of Race in the Age of Freedom: Emancipation and the Transformation of Republican Schooling in Baltimore, 1860-1867," Civil War History 2006 52(3): 229-254
3. ↑ Geoffrey L. Buckley, et al. "The Patapsco Forest Reserve: Establishing a 'City Park' for Baltimore, 1907-1941," Historical Geography 2006 34: 87-108
4. ↑ Richard S. Chew, "Certain Victims of an International Contagion: The Panic of 1797 and the Hard Times of the Late 1790s in Baltimore," Journal of the Early Republic 2005 25(4): 565-613
5. ↑ Christopher Phillips Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1791-1860 (1997)
6. ↑ Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (2004)
7. ↑ Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (2000)