History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item Odd Characters: Queer Lives in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore(2020) SCHMITT, KATHRYN; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Queer history in Baltimore began long before the twentieth century. People who diverged from societal norms of gender and sexuality were always present in Baltimore’s history, and they can be seen through media representations and popular press of the time period. Even when representation of queerness in media was less common, stories of people who diverged from gender and sexual norms were still distributed to the public. Media representations provided inspiration and information to people who did not have access to a group of like-minded people through a distinct subculture. Queer Baltimoreans drew from media representations, early stages of a developing subculture, or their own personal thoughts and feelings to inform their gender and sexual identities. Despite the legal and social measures restricting these people from living their lives as freely as they might wish, they still found individualized ways to live life outside of gender and sexual norms.Item The Sole Measure of Service: A Social History of Baltimore's Public Libraries During World War II(2019) Coddington, Gwenlyn; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the history of public libraries in Baltimore and Maryland during World War II. Drawing from contemporary newspapers and institutional records, it argues that World War II expanded institutional opportunities for public libraries while exposing their limitations as agents of social change. Concentrating on how Baltimore’s libraries successfully contributed to and enabled the war’s information economy undercuts the narrative of libraries’ impotency as information centers during this period by locating their validation among the communities they served, rather than their relationship with the state or their postwar status. However, even as the war enabled this transformation, it simultaneously exposed the limits of libraries’ social ideology, destabilizing their position as institutions of social progressivism. Analyzing gender discrimination within librarianship and the experiences of African American Marylanders as users and library professionals demonstrates the limited vision Baltimore’s librarians held for enacting meaningful change within their institutions and communities.Item Moving Milk: Public Health, Milk Transportation, and Modal Choices in Baltimore, 1840-1940(2018) McDonald, James Dixon; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis studies the factors leading to the modal shift from rail to road in Baltimore’s farm to city milk transportation in the 1920s. It draws on histories of transportation, public health, food, and business to maintain that progressive public health regulation, driven by calls for reform of the milk supply, created an oligopoly for which trucks better suited vertical integration goals. This research highlights the relevance of public health policy to the study of transportation regulation and modal competition. Secondarily, this thesis establishes railroads as a primary actor in the 19th century rise in urban milk consumption.Item Edifice Complex: Public Stadium Funding and Urban Redevelopment in Baltimore, Maryland(2018) Bucacink, Ian Charles; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1980s, Marylanders engaged in a public debate over the need to replace Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. New stadium proponents, led by an elite coalition of politicians, businesspeople, and the newspapers, argued that Baltimore needed professional sports teams economically, as well as for the positive image they bestowed upon the city. Only a new publically-funded stadium would prevent the baseball Orioles from following the football Colts out of town, these supporters contented. A large segment of the public questioned the need to replace Memorial Stadium and suggested alternative social priorities for state funding, but the state legislature decided to fund the new stadium complex at Camden Yards anyway, despite intense popular opposition. For Baltimore’s elites, the issue was about more than sports. The new stadiums were a defense and continuation of the city’s neoliberal policies of urban redevelopment, along with all that those policies entailed, both good and bad.Item "To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might": African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910-1930(2015) Doster, Dennis Anthony; Barkley Brown, Elsa; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“‘To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might’: African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910–1930” examines the nature, character and scope of early civil rights activism among African Americans in Baltimore, Maryland. Utilizing an expansive definition of “civil rights,” it explores not only voting and holding political office, access to public education, and fair housing opportunities; it also considers struggles for access to municipal and social services and struggles related to labor and employment. By placing all of these terrains of struggle under the umbrella of “civil rights,” the dissertation emphasizes the importance of these rights in relation to one another and their importance in the minds and lives of African Americans who struggled for rights in each of these categories as part of a broader struggle for equality. Baltimore has long been recognized for its civil rights activism by scholars who portray the era of the 1930s to 1950s as a kind of “golden age” of civil rights activism in the city, considering such activism to have been dormant prior to that period. The dissertation reveals an active civil rights movement in the city in the decades preceding the 1930s that was led primarily by members of the middle-class but drew widespread support and strength from members of all classes in Baltimore’s African American community. In uncovering the civil rights activism of the period from 1910 to 1930, the dissertation brings to the forefront previously ignored organizations, including the Federation of Parent-Teacher Clubs, the Women’s Cooperative Civic League, the Independent Republican League, and the Baltimore Urban League. It also reveals that the activism of the period from 1910 to 1930 was important in launching major civil rights campaigns of national organizations such as the NAACP, whose residential segregation campaign had roots in the fight in Baltimore. Throughout, the dissertation explores the ways that black Baltimoreans defined priorities and struggled for rights, resulting in a more nuanced understanding of African Americans’ struggles for citizenship and equality at beginning of the twentieth century.Item A CONSUMING HERITAGE: BALTIMORE'S EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY AND THEIR EVOLVING FOODWAYS, 1880-1939(2013) Sturm, Charlotte Louise; Mar, Lisa R; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores how Baltimore's Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their American-born children engaged with American foodways during the period 1880-1939. Food-related charitable aid and food education were used as tools of Americanization and moral uplift by public health officials, middle-class charitable workers, and social reformers between 1880 and 1920. The home economics classrooms of Baltimore's public schools continued this work in the early twentieth century, teaching the immigrants' American-born children lessons about food and middle-class domesticity. Although somewhat influential in reshaping the immigrants' food habits, the Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children largely retained their traditional foodways, making their own choices about how to adopt American foodways. Interconnected issues of food, health, economics, middle-class domesticity, citizenship, and identity are evident in this study. Using sources such as cookbooks and oral histories, this study demonstrates how foodways expressed and continue to express Jewish, American, and Jewish American identities.Item LEARNED BEHAVIOR: RACE, RELIGION, ETHNICITY AND THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION IN 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, 1825 - 1872(2012) Ryan, Meghan Higgins; Mar, Lisa R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the complex relationship between religion and racial/ethnic identity through the perspective of the evolving systems of public and private education in 19th century Baltimore. In doing so, this thesis argues that public education was constructed as a means of shaping a unified American identity, and that this purpose was understood by all relevant stakeholders. These stakeholders, regardless or their religious, racial or ethnic affiliation all fought to shape the public schools into something that validated their affiliations and included them in the definition of American citizenship.Item "Dear Little Living Arguments": Orphans and Other Poor Children, Their Families and Orphanages, Baltimore and Liverpool, 1840-1910(2009) Wilson, Marcy Kay; Gullickson, Gay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Orphanages in the United States and England cared for thousands of children between the early decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These institutions were central to local provisions for the poor during a time period in which state and government poor relief remained limited. Though a small group of studies have focused on American orphan asylums and even fewer works have evaluated English orphanages, no effort has of yet been made to engage in a comparative analysis of the institutions that cared for so many children in both countries. Through analysis of Protestant orphan asylum registers, correspondence, committee minutes, and annual reports, this dissertation investigates the local provisions made for poor children in Baltimore, Maryland and Liverpool, England, between 1840 and 1910, examines the socio-economic realities of the families these children came from, the ways in which poor children in both cities were affected by the needs of their families and the aid available to them, and the similarities and differences that existed between these orphanages and their residents. This dissertation argues that there were significant differences between orphanage inhabitants in both cities when it came to parental survival and to who children ended up with after their residence in these institutions, but that the orphanages were remarkably alike, providing the poor children in their care with similar educational, religious and vocational training that the middle-class reformers who ran these institutions understood as gender and class appropriate. This study reveals a prolonged commitment on the part of orphanage administrators in both cities to the use of indenture as a dismissal method, and suggests as well the existence of a shared trans-Atlantic understanding of poor children and their labor when it came to these asylum officials.