Events

Past Events

View recordings of past lectures, seminars, tours and workshops, as well as helpful training videos on how to use various records in our collections in our free online Presentation Library.

May Virtual Lunch and Learn - “Writing the Biography of Frederick Douglass and the Bailey/Douglass Family: Scenes from the Archives”

This talk will survey selected sources for the writing of a comprehensive, historical biography of Frederick Douglass and the Bailey/Douglass family. It will proceed scenically in the manner of an illustrated historical panorama, matching documentary evidence (chosen mostly from Maryland archives) to central events in the history of one of our country's most remarkable families from the 1660s to the fall of Richmond in 1865.

Ezra Greenspan, Edmund and Louise Kahn Chair in the Humanities, Emeritus at Southern Methodist University, is a literary, cultural, and media historian who has written biographies of Walt Whitman, G. P. Putnam, and William Wells Brown. He is currently writing a comprehensive biography of Frederick (Bailey) Douglass and his generic family, whose coverage will run from 1634 into the twentieth century.

June Virtual Lunch and Learn - “The Best Evidence Yet for an Anomalous Animal”: Documenting the Cultural History of Chessie the Sea Monster

Dr. Eric A. Cheezum will present on his new book, Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster, telling the story of the Bay's legendary cryptid, and will describe the research methodology involved in uncovering its history. Dr. Cheezum explores the project's origin as his dissertation and its long gestation and path to publication, along with the extensive research and interviews that made the work possible, and some of the key figures and connections whose generosity ensured that the facts of Chessie's amazing career were brought to the surface. As Chessie's story will show, truth really is stranger than fiction!

Eric A. Cheezum is a native of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He received his B.A. in History from Salisbury State University in 1999, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina in 2002 and 2008, respectively. Besides Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster (Johns Hopkins, 2024), he is the co-author of Woodrow Wilson (CQ Press, 2003) with Kendrick A. Clements. He is an adjunct professor at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills, Maryland and a full-time farmer.

July Virtual Lunch and Learn - Unearthing, Preserving, and Promoting LGBTQ+ History in Maryland

An 1870s lesbian gunslinger. Extravagant 1930s drag balls. Mass protests of the 1980s and 1990s. All are a part of our story.

In 2018, Preservation Maryland engaged in a project to create the first comprehensive study of LGBTQ+ history and historic preservation across Maryland. In conducting the research for this project, Ben Egerman was able to identify a wide array of places associated with LGBTQ+ history and create a number of resources to help those interested in the subject learn more about our communities’ rich and vibrant history in the state.

Since then, he has presented with another librarian and community elders on the subject of local LGBTQ+ history to audiences across the state, as well as working with students, artists, and academics to promote and build awareness of Maryland’s LGBTQ+ past.

This talk will discuss these projects, what they tell us about Maryland’s history, and some of the difficulties in doing research in this area–all punctuated by amazing and eye-opening stories of LGBTQ+ people and life in the state stretching back nearly 200 years.

Ben Egerman (he/him) is a public librarian and researcher living in Baltimore. His work with Preservation Maryland on the Maryland LGBTQ Historic Context Study yielded a preliminary list of over 300 extant sites related to LGBTQ+ history in the state, and has been recognized by the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History , who awarded the project the Allan Berube Prize for community history in early 2024. He has worked with a fellow librarian and two community elders to bring various stories from Maryland’s LGBTQ+ past to audiences in libraries across the state. He aims for his work to lie at the intersection of community building, advocacy, and public history.

August Virtual Lunch and Learn - Race and the Road: Fighting the “Highway to Nowhere” and Neighborhood Destruction in Baltimore

Drawing from his book, Stop the Road, Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars, Evans Paull gives an up close and personal account of Baltimore’s 40-year battle over expressway plans. Paull reveals astonishing stories of how a ragtag band of neighborhood activists, preservationists, and environmentalists managed to protect Baltimore’s historic waterfront communities of Federal Hill, Fell’s Point, and Canton. But this talk also provides a unique window into the city’s callous and unfair treatment its African American populations. The most famous example is the “Highway to Nowhere,” but Paull also delves into the equally revealing cases of the highways that shattered Sharp-Leadenhall and Rosemont. This is Baltimore and its history with race, all revealed in unflinching detail.

Northwest Baltimore resident E. Evans Paull is the author of Stop the Road, Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars (2022). His career spanned 45 years working as a city planner, first in Baltimore and then nationally on urban redevelopment issues. Paull’s consulting business, Redevelopment Economics, specialized in the challenging renewal issues that come under the umbrella of “brownfields” (contaminated/impaired land).

Paull has won several awards, including: Brownfields Leadership Award, Phoenix Award (for brownfields redevelopment), Governor’s Smart Growth Award and Professional Achievement in Economic Development Award from the Maryland Chapter American Planning Association. Paull has authored articles that have appeared in twelve professional journals

Paull is now retired and enjoying life with his wife, three children, and one grandchild.