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In 1634, the colony of St. Mary’s City was founded by Lord Baltimore. Jesuits accompanied the colonists in hopes of evangelizing the Indians. Their efforts were partly successful. Because of religious upheavals in England, the inability to evangelize the Indian, and the sharp population increase of Catholic colonists, the Jesuits in Maryland shifted goals and became ministers to European Catholics. The Maryland Mission eventually extended to Pennsylvania.

Maryland was founded as a refuge for upper-class Roman Catholics, and its early law served their needs. Later, Puritans settled in Maryland, took control of its government, and attempted to impose New England law on the province. When Lord Baltimore, the Catholic proprietor, regained control, economic forces similar to those in Virginia pushed Maryland's planters to emulate the legal system of their southerly neighbor. The end result was that Maryland developed a common-law based legal order that focused on obtaining labor from servants, collecting debts, and thereby encouraging English investors to lend money to Maryland planters.

This chapter gives new information about the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, which destroyed more than 140 acres and left 35,000 Baltimoreans jobless. The event ranks with the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as among the great disasters of American history. The press was hurt most among all the city's industries, but was the first to recover. One of the newspapers cited for their contributions during the crisis was Mencken's Baltimore Herald. The Baltimore Fire also bound Mencken more strongly to the city of his birth and determined the future course of his career, away from writing poetry and fiction and to the choice he had been struggling to make for himself.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of the African church movement in various cities along the eastern seaboard — especially Baltimore and Philadelphia — and the efforts of the sea captain, Paul Cuffe, to initiate a black-controlled emigration movement that he hoped would build long-lasting ties between Sierra Leone and blacks in North America, helping to create an “African” people and a diasporic “African” nation.

This introductory chapter examines Baltimore as a key site for the development of a new approach to urban ecology: an ecology of cities. This approach is based on four propositions. First, the ecology of cities addresses the complete mosaic of land uses and management in metropolitan systems. Second, the urban mosaic is complex: spatially, organizationally, and temporally. Third, an ecology of cities is an integrative pursuit utilizing midrange theories and is often designed to both enhance fundamental understanding and address practical issues. Ultimately, the book's goal is to develop a more general scientific understanding of urban ecological systems and to increase the practical capacity of decision makers to address the complexity and interdependence of urban ecological problems. Fourth, an ecology of cities can be useful for linking and advancing both practice and science. In addition, the chapter discusses the advantages of using a patch dynamics approach to urban ecology.

This chapter presents two examples to illustrate the utility of a patch dynamics approach for decision making: London's cholera epidemic of 1854 and Baltimore's urban tree canopy goal and sustainability plan. These exemplify two important inflexion points: the Sanitary City that emerged in the late 1800s and the Sustainable City idea that emerged in the late 1900s. The cholera epidemic of 1854 in the Soho district of London was an important event that led to advances in public investments, public administration, and science, which were important to the emergence of the Sanitary City. Baltimore's urban tree canopy goal and sustainability plan is representative of the changes necessary for the Sustainable City: managing the entire urban mosaic, polycentric forms of governance, and interdisciplinary science.

This chapter describes how a restorative process called community conferencing combined with a traditional community organizing effort transformed a neighborhood. The strengths and limitations of community conferencing are explored. The case study involves a seemingly intractable conflict involving football playing in a Baltimore neighborhood. The conflict which is described in the chapter led to a community conference that led to the creation of a football league and ultimately the transformation of a neighborhood. The chapter covers the history, principles, and practice skills associated with community conferencing. It suggests that community conferencing can be an important tool for addressing a conflict and is a very strong complement to traditional community practice interventions. The chapter further purports that community conferencing can be an effective strategy to support the development of collective efficacy, a condition that has been found to reduce crime, as neighbors know each other, share values, and are willing to intervene in neighborhood problems.

Mencken was hired by the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper he would be associated with for the rest of his life. As Sunday editor, he pushed for innovations such as new illustrations, printing changes, and exciting articles on medicine, humor, music, and theater. However, Mencken once again began to feel restless. He wrote a book on Nietzsche, the first one published in the United States, and set forth his own iconoclastic views. He continued with his drama criticism, and broke away from Anglophile models by translating Henrick Ibsen's plays into colloquial American English. He thought about marriage, but felt that he did not have the time. He also met Theodore Dreiser.

Mencken's penchant for battling with reformers took on a new stand when he launched a public outcry against the censorship of The Genius by Theodore Dresier. Together, Mencken and Dreiser were viewed as the drivers of a major literary revolution. At the same time, Mencken met the sister of one of Dreiser's girlfriends — a young writer named Marion Bloom — and began a passionate affair that would continue well into the 1920s. Despite this, Mencken remained depressed about the world situation and his own professional future, and he found life growing unendurably stagnant. Throughout 1916, he constantly thought of Germany, and headed to Berlin to cover the war as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.

The 1920s began with the advent of the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition, which Mencken viewed as the ultimate violation of the civil liberties that he cherished. His battle against Prohibition was accompanied by his efforts to reinvigorate the Baltimore Sun, to make it free to deal honestly and realistically with politicians and the American scene. Mencken's efforts to embrace these ideals in his newspaper prepare the reader to comprehend his disillusionment with the practice of journalism in the years ahead. For the next eighteen years until 1938, Mencken wrote a weekly “Monday Article”, different from “The Free Lance” diatribes that he wrote years earlier. Without straining for effect, Mencken addressed issues of civil liberty and free speech, and became a leading national voice.

Although no longer writing for the Sun, Mencken remained a prominent board member. His relationship with the Newspaper Guild reflected the contradiction in his role as a free speech advocate: he refused to recognize the difference between an employee with no economic power advocating membership, and management officials, like himself, who pressured employees against their right to join unions. Mencken clung to the belief that a man's individual efforts must speak for him.

Mencken instinctively knew that he would continue to make waves long after his death, leaving behind enough manuscripts, including his infamous Diary, to make this inevitable. During his lifetime, when it came to charges of racism, he believed that his work would depend “not on what those people think of me, but on what I've done”. Although Mencken could arouse feelings of disappointment, his actions towards men and women, white or black, whose civil rights were oppressed, were given new perspective. Modern readers are reminded how Mencken's literary influence changed the course of American literature and liberated American thinking. Mencken's style of writing and his courage to express boldly his beliefs continue to inspire readers all over the world today.

Henry Louis Mencken joined the staff of the Baltimore Herald in 1899. Mencken's world had expanded from the confines of the family cigar factory to the world of Baltimore and beyond. This chapter provides a glimpse of the newspaper business during the early years of the century, when typewriters were hardly used and telephones were regarded as mere toys.

While working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, young reporter Mencken finds time to write short stories and poetry. His influences include Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Dresier. All this activity takes its toll, and Mencken travels to the Caribbean to recuperate. His previous notions of race were shattered upon seeing that unlike the African-Americans in Baltimore, those in Jamaica were given high positions in government and administration. He begins writing a humorous column on local politics, but yearns for more excitement in his life.

Mencken tried to rehabilitate the Herald after the Baltimore Fire. In his desperation, he abandoned his own principles and printed a fabricated story about the Russo-Japanese war. Restless, he came to the realization that journalism was fleeting, and that “the man who devotes his life to it writes his history in water.” He returned to drama criticism, a powerful medium for scrutinizing the beliefs of society. His first serious book of criticism was on playwright George Bernard Shaw. Although His literary stature was rising, it could not avert the demise of his newspaper, the Baltimore Herald.

This chapter examines the history of the New York Yankees baseball team and their Yankee Stadium in New York City. The Yankees started their history as the bankrupt remnants of an old National League powerhouse, the Baltimore Orioles. When the team moved to New York in 1930 it was renamed the New York Highlanders with the Hilltop Park as its home stadium. In January 1915, the team was sold to Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston. The team's dynasty started with the inaugural season of Babe Ruth in 1920, winning its first pennant in the 1921 season. The planning, design and acquisition of a property for the construction of the stadium started in January 1921.

A Baltimore resident wrote in February 1844 about the impending presidential election to the son of the certain Whig standard bearer, Henry Clay of Kentucky. Their own unprecedented harmony, the Democrats' apparent disarray, and faith that they had the superior issues and candidate generated Whig confidence. Their missionary tone, the frequent use of words such as “righteousness” and “redemption”, however, derived from another aspect of the race. Clay's long years of frustration began before the creation of the Whig party in 1834. In 1824 and again in 1832 he ran for president, and each time he was soundly thrashed. That record of failure both stigmatized Clay as a loser and, ironically, made the formation of the Whig party both necessary and possible. To understand why and to identify the seeds from which the Whig party grew, a brief review of political developments between 1800 and 1832 is necessary.