Bmore Historic 2022 took place in-person at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Friday, September 23. Students were free this year!
What do we do at Bmore Historic?
Past, in-person unconferences have been structured around four session blocks: two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We usually have between four to six sessions in each of the time blocks for a total of twenty sessions throughout the day.
Final Session III 1:40-2:30 PM
Black Churches in the Restoration Room
Preservation for the People (Poppleton & Sharp Leadenhall) in the Lunch Room
Decline of the Trolley in the Assembly Line
Final DEBRIEF w/ Kate Drabinski & Kalin Thomas in the Studio (by entrance)
THEN… happy hour at Little Havana’s. Where the conversations continue.
Thank you for coming! follow @bmorehistoric to stay in touch
Students will present their collaborative A Place Called Poppleton StoryMap project as part of UMBC’s Public Humanities End-of-the-semester Showcase on Friday May 7 from 4 – 5:30pm via Blackboard Collaborate (click link here to join).
In addition, WEDNESDAY, MAY 12 at 5pm students will share their StoryMap project, interviews, walking tour brochure, and zine (designed by artist Markele Cullins) with communities members who so graciously took the time to talk with us and the general public via a student ZOOM PRESENTATION. For info and link see our Facebook Event.
The 700 block of W. Baltimore St. and the Poppleton firehouse – from the 1975 Poppleton Study by Phoebe Stanton
Sarah Ann Street Alley Houses, built circa 1860
The project is a collaboration between Nicole King’s Preserving Places, Making Spaces in Baltimore course and Bill Shewbridge’s Media Projection fellows. King’s American Studies students have been researching the history of Poppleton and Shewbridge’s students producing short films from interviews and in the field on the history of Poppleton and how local stakeholder feel about the neighborhood’s changes related to redevelopment.
A Place Called Poppleton documents the history and culture of the Poppleton neighborhood of Southwest Baltimore. UMBC students will produce a StoryMap digital walking tour of the neighborhood with a focus on the area’s African American history and places lost or endangered due to redevelopment. We seek to document and share engaging stories of the past and present through archival research and listening to those who live, work, and are connected to Poppleton.
We are working in collaboration with Curtis Eaddy II of the Southwest Partnership and Sonia Eaddy of the Poppleton Now! neighborhood association.
To read the entire Urbanite article from 2005 on the Eaddy home in Poppleton, click here.
UMBC students working on the A Place Called Poppleton project invite you to a presentation of their initial work plan on Wednesday, March 10 from 5-6pm … Join Zoom Meeting
The A Place Called Poppleton project documents the history and culture of the Poppleton neighborhood of Southwest Baltimore.
UMBC students will produce a StoryMap digital walking tour of the neighborhood with a focus on the area’s African American history and places lost or endangered due to redevelopment. We seek to document and share engaging stories of the past and present through archival research and listening to those who live, work, and are connected to Poppleton.
Curtis Eaddy II interviews his parents Curtis and Sonia Eaddy in front of the family’s rowhouse in Poppleton, December 2020.
We are working in collaboration with Curtis Eaddy II of the Southwest Partnership and Sonia Eaddy of the Poppleton Now! neighborhood association.
We would like your feel back on people and places that matter in Poppleton!
The Baltimore Field School is accepting applications for a student fellow to assist us with graphic design, content creation, and web design for an estimated 5 hours per week during the spring semester. This position offers a $1,000 stipend from the Orser Center endowment.
Send applications to Baltimore Field School program assistant Imani Spence (UMBC ‘16) [email protected] by February 5.
Sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Baltimore Field School is a planning intensive focusing on building collaborative public arts and humanities projects developed with community partners. The project seeks to create a model of ethical humanities research and teaching in Baltimore and cities like it. During 2021, we will focus on programming, a week-long summer institute, and a fall convening. The Baltimore Field School is committed to anti-racist and decolonial models of engagement working with communities in Baltimore.
The student fellow must be interested in Baltimore and the arts and humanities. Working directly with the program assistant, the fellow will help develop graphic design branding and the Baltimore Field School website and promotions focused on information and updates for participants of the Field School as well as the public.
The position requires:
Interest in the future of Baltimore City
Skills working in WordPress
Graphic Design skills using Adobe Creative Suite
Experience and interest in the arts and humanities as social change agents
Generative; building off ideas and creating more possibilities
Application should include: (1) a CV/resume (no longer than 2 pages), (2) a paragraph on your interests and potential contribution to the Baltimore Field School (included in the body of the email), and (3) links to work samples.
Student can receive 3 credits of for AMST 498: Internship as part of the fellowship. Start date is February 15.
Wednesdays – 4 – 6:30pm (online) – Prof. Nicole King – [email protected] w/ community fellow Curtis Eaddy of the Southwest Partnership
AMST 422/682 is a public humanities seminar where students develop a preservation project on the overlooked history of a Baltimore neighborhood. As part of the Baltimore Traces: Communities in Transition project students will explore the city’s social history with a focus on the southwest neighborhood of Poppleton. Poppleton’s history is a case study exploring the ravages of urban renewal, highway construction, and redevelopment as well as the rich traditions of African American culture in West Baltimore.
This course will educate students in documenting and preserving cultural history through place-based research and oral history/ethnographic methods.
Bmore Historic 2020 will take place virtually on Friday, September 18. Register here!
What do we do at Bmore Historic?
Bmore Historic 2020 will be structured differently than previous yeats because we are holding the unconference virtually. Past, in-person unconferences have been structured around four session blocks: two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We usually have between four to six sessions in each of the time blocks for a total of twenty sessions throughout the day.
Here is our 2020 schedule:
9:00: Introduction to Bmore Historic 2020
9:05: Zoom Tips
9:10: Ice Breaker
9:20-10:05: Session 1: Nobody Wants to Go to Your Zoom Thing Anymore: Engaging Audiences in the Era of Coronavirus
5 minute break
10:10-11:00: Session 2: Ethics in Archiving
5 minute break
11:05-11:50: Session 3: Confederate Memorials and Columbus Monuments: What’s To Be Done?
The Oral History Association is proud to announce the release of its new suite of remote interviewing resources. These resources are a product of the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirement to cease face-to-face interviewing for the health of both narrator and interviewer. By March 2020, many of us found ourselves sheltering in place, trying to learn how to do our jobs from home. For those working in oral history, remote interviewing became a pathway to continue essential oral history work. This guide is meant to be a resource to practitioners as they work through the numerous questions that arise with this method.
Though the current environment requires us to set aside face-to-face interviewing, these resources are intended to inform our practice beyond the international crisis created by COVID-19. There are many reasons for in-person interviewing to be our default, but those who developed this guide feel that remote interviewing should have a place in our practice even when it is safe to resume meeting face to face.
The Oral History Association’s Remote Interviewing Resources Task Force developed these materials, including a decision tree, accompanying narrative, case studies, and recording platform documents. Neither the decision tree nor the case studies are intended to cover all available platforms; we have tried to include information on platforms that are currently seeing the most use in the profession. We will add more case studies and information on additional platforms over time. Further, as technology around remote interviewing develops and evolves, we will do our best to keep this guide up to date.
Task Force Members included Jen Cramer, Natalie Fousekis, Andy Kolovos, Rachel Mears, Sarah Milligan, Steven Sielaff, and Amy Starecheski, with chair Allison Tracy-Taylor. We relied on colleagues and in some instances our own programs to supply case studies, and we thank everyone who contributed for their time and expertise.
Black Yield Institute, along with Cherry Hill Development Corporation, Elev8 Baltimore, Raising InnerCity Hope (RICH), and Youth Resiliency Institute, manages and operates a food and resource distribution hub that supplies a monthly supply of food to 200 elders and families in Cherry Hill. We also supply goods to small businesses and nonprofits feeding people across Baltimore. Most food donations will be provided by a local foundation and others by emergency food efforts. Some food will be procured from Black farmers in the region and produced by BYI. Since March 14, we have collectively:
Provided 500 to 600 nutritional balanced meals per day (with support from Mera Kitchen Collective & Wilde Thyme)
Shared 200 total bags of activities and hygiene products
Shared over 5200 total meals.
Worked over 800 hours of service
Provided on-site and provided resources to other communities from West, East and South Baltimore
Procured 50 pounds of salad and brassicas from a local farm and harvested 30 pounds of collards from our farm, Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden
Distributed 10,000 pounds of fresh, frozen, and dried goods
Please feel free to donate to our work through PayPal ([email protected]) and CashApp and Venmo ($/@blackyield). Learn more or discuss other ways to support, like in-kind donations, by emailing Brother Eric at [email protected]. The Black Yield Institute family really appreciates your consideration of monetary and/or in-kind donations and good vibes, prayers. Please share with others!
This call comes from Holden Warren, who has been working with Arabbers and with food justice efforts in Baltimore for years:
For over 200 years the Arabbers have been a trusted institution of Baltimore’s Black community, a population that has shown to be disproportionately impacted by the current Covid 19 virus. The Arabber Preservation Society wants to leverage this trust to prepare, protect and nourish the community. Starting Wed April 8th, Arabbers will be given training on the protective measures and basic PPE training, then in collaboration with Food Rescue Baltimore, will give away rescued food, cloth masks, gloves, reusable bags and corona virus information into the east and west side neighborhoods they normally service. Depending on the steadiness of food and supplies, we want to go out multiple times per week.
We are looking for donations of cloth masks, gloves, disinfectants, and reusable bags for distribution and money to support the Arabbers, horse, stable hands, and support staff.
More updates coming – to help reach out to [email protected] or www.arabbers.com or www.foodrescuebaltimore.org
VISIT THESE SITES TO DONATE AND SUPPORT THIS WORK:
Holden Warren was in the Peace Corps in Tonga and later in Monrovia during the Ebola outbreak. He brings these experiences in public health education and inequities in our systems to addressing today’s current challenges. Holden and crew are organizing free food distribution with specific health education messaging for people on their routes.
Holden made a short film John & James (2018), an intimate portrait of the cross-cultural bond between Baltimore’s iconic Arabbers and a community of rural Pennsylvania Mennonites. United by a love of horses and decades of doing business at the New Holland auction, they finally break bread together.
We were in the process of organizing a showing and discussion of the film this spring at UMBC when the current pandemic hit. We are committed to bringing this programming back when we resume in-person activities on campus and develop the Baltimore Field School in 2021. However, during the current emergency, please share information and donate supplies or money to these organizations doing important work on the front lines in Baltimore.
Due to the Covid-19 emergency, the Baltimore Field School project team requested and received a one-year extension from Mellon on the project and plan to pause major work. The inaugural Baltimore Field School will be postponed until summer 2021.
As director of the Orser Center, Nicole King will continue to work on setting up the project’s website, studying similar summer institutes, and developing more resources on public humanities. Our wonderful Project Manager, Imani Spence, and King will remain in contact with our partners at Black Yield Institute and the Southwest Partnership. The project team hopes to resume some planning capacity this summer and we will convene a meeting of this group again at the start to the fall 2020 semester.
Here’s a brief overview of the project and our current partners on the Summer 2021 BALTIMORE FIELD SCHOOL:
The summer 2021 Baltimore Field School, a humanities-based training intensive, will create a framework for faculty and graduate students to collaborate with community organizations in developing methods for ethical research and teaching projects focused on public humanities in Baltimore. The project is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The pilot Baltimore Field School will run for two weeks in summer 2021. All UMBC faculty and graduate students working in the humanities are eligible to apply. The field school will have approximately 12 participants from UMBC. Participants should be interested in publicly engaged research and programming in Baltimore. All field school participants will be paid a stipend of $3,000 and lunch will be provided during the field school summer institutes. The field school will be based at the CAHSS downtown classroom at the Lion Brothers Building in Southwest Baltimore, and participants will be working in the field in South and Southwest Baltimore.
PRIMARY FIELD SCHOOL PARTNERS
Eric Jackson and Black Yield Institute
Black Yield Institute is a Pan-African power institution based in Baltimore, Maryland, serving as a think tank and collective action network that addresses food apartheid. Since our beginning in November 2015, we have worked collaboratively with black people and entities, along with other institutions, in pursuit of Black land and food sovereignty. We are to build independent power by establishing an action network and serving as an incubator for ideas and projects. We are unapologetically a Black-led institution, utilizing Afrocentric, Pan-African, and human rights frameworks to anchor our thought and works toward liberation through food.
Eric Jackson is an organizer, educator, and filmmaker, humbly serving as the visionary and a co-founder of Black Yield Institute, committed to building a movement toward Black Land and Food Sovereignty in Baltimore. Currently, he and his team, are committed to a 1.25 acre urban agriculture operation and building a cooperatively-owned grocery store in South Baltimore, while also conducting Black-led research, facilitating political education, and organizing an action network. Eric has over a decade of experience working in and with communities operating programming and helping people to build power and address a myriad of issues, including food inequities. A Baltimore native from the Cherry Hill Community, Eric is the recipient of numerous awards and a public speaker who has presented hundreds of addresses and workshops to diverse groups about food sovereignty, building power, and establishing strong organizations to address complex social issues, specific to people of African Descent. He is affirmed in and secured this work through the love of his family and friends, especially the brilliance of his Queen, Diara, and four children, Oryan, Erian, Amir, & Kamau!
Curtis Eaddy and Southwest Partnership
TheSouthwest Partnership envisions an awesome, healthy, architecturally beautiful, diverse, cohesive community of choice built on mutual respect and shared responsibility. We embrace all diversity: from race, gender, and sexual orientation to economic, education, and housing choice. Our diversity is our strength. The Southwest Partnership aims to maintain this vision through productive land uses and partnerships that will maintain a cohesive community. We partner with our neighbors, surrounding communities, city government, area institutions, and businesses, knowing that when we take the right road together, and with integrity, everyone will benefit. The Southwest Partnership is a coalition of seven neighborhood associations and six anchor institutions in Southwest Baltimore. We work together to build awesome communities in the Southwest Partnership Area: the neighborhoods of Barre Circle, Franklin Square, Hollins Roundhouse, Mount Clare, Pigtown, Poppleton, and Union Square.
Curtis Eaddy was born in Baltimore and raised in Poppleton. He is a community artist and a Hip Hop DJ and Emcee, who has been programming events for more than ten-years. As a student at Frostburg State University, he founded an Arts & Entertainment campus-organization to provide diverse cultural events to unite a non-diverse college-community. After graduating, he returned to Baltimore and continued organizing for public events in Baltimore City Public Schools, and non-profit organizations (College Bound Foundation, Reginald F. Lewis Museum). His passion for community development brought him to the Southwest Partnership. His plan as Marketing and Events Manager is to identify opportunities for and develop new events to help bridge the disconnect between the neighborhoods in the community. Curtis is responsible for supporting and publicizing community events and marketing the Southwest Partnership and the neighborhoods.
Project Evaluator/Assessor
Dr. Tahira Mahdiis a community psychologist and consultant based in the Baltimore-Washington, DC region. Tahira develops and facilitates workshops and presentations for community programs, businesses, organizations, and college/university students and personnel regarding internal & external community matters, equity & diversity, and research & evaluation.
UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) is pleased to announce the launch of a fourteen-month initiative to promote diversity, inclusion, and social justice in the public humanities, supported by a $125,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project, Strengthening UMBC’s Public Humanities Infrastructure: The Baltimore Field School, will create a framework for faculty to collaborate with community organizations in building ethical and sustainable research and teaching projects focused on public humanities.
King works with students Dawn Baskin and DeAndre Bright to get an informed consent form signed by Lonnie Combs as part of the A Walk Down West Baltimore Street project (spring 2019). –photo by Bill Shewbridge
A new view of public humanities
The Baltimore Field School is coordinated by UMBC’s Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture and led by Nicole King, associate professor of American Studies and director of the Orser Center, and CAHSS Dean Scott Casper. It aims to advance UMBC’s humanistic scholarship and teaching, rooted in deep and meaningful engagement with communities and neighborhoods.
“We want to think differently about how public humanities work can be done by reflecting on what ethical community-university partnerships look like,” says King.
For more on the project, please read the full story HERE.
