Newsroom

America’s annual celebration of Black History month honors the innumerable (and all too often, overlooked) contributions that African Americans have made to this country. It is also a time to strive for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the role of race...

It began with a visit, on a calm December day, to a spacious, sunlit farmhouse on the edge of Leakin Park. There I encountered for the first time John Clark Mayden’s Baltimore “street portraits”—photographs set worlds away from that peaceful location … or so...

Photography is my passion and I enjoy the process of bringing stories to life. With each facial expression, setting, or environment in the picture, there is a personal or communal untold story to be shared. The pictures in Baltimore Lives give life to the...

The heated arguments, protests and acts of violence related to the fate of statues honoring the Confederate cause during the Civil War are now well known. Decisions to move those memorials, remove them, or leave them in place are increasingly contentious and...

Racial tension is alive and well in America. Think Ferguson, Missouri; politicians vying for the African American vote; disputes over statues of Confederate soldiers and the Confederate flag; the Supreme Court’s rejection of two newly-drawn electoral districts...

Historians have overlooked the way black veterans of the greatest generation recalled their service during World War II. I argue the problem is that historians are too preoccupied with finding the origins of the civil rights movement in the wartime experiences...

Octavius McFarland was one of the millions of nameless, faceless slaves who toiled in Southern fields during antebellum times. His ceaseless labors made life comfortable for his white masters and fueled the booming Southern agrarian economy. His legal status...

I wanted to highlight the century-long struggle of African Americans to obtain the right to vote. The civil rights movement, sometimes referred to as the black freedom struggle, is one of the most compelling episodes of the American experience. After slavery...

By Bob Post My friend at the MIT Museum, Deborah Douglas, describes Who Owns America’s Past? as “part history, part memoir, part polemic.” Such a trifurcation was not really on my mind as I wrote, but now I know Debbie is spot on. The polemic concerns, first...