A new site for a new project

Welcome to our new site for Baltimore’s Civil Rights Heritage! At Baltimore Heritage, we are passionate about trying out new ways to make our work accessible, engaging and useful. We created this site (using an open-source tool known as Jekyll) to openly share our writing, research notes, and other resources as we put together a historic context and National Register multiple property designation form.

In the past, when we are working to nominate a building to the National Register of Historic Places, we don’t share anything until the nomination is nearly complete. A single nomination can involve months of solitary research and writing. When the draft is complete, we seek out revisions and comments from neighborhood residents, scholars, and Maryland Historical Trust staff before the nomination is finalized and sent on to the National Park Service for review. For this project, we wanted to try something different — an experiment with “Open Notebook History” where anyone at all can look over our shoulder and share their thoughts on what we’re writing from beginning to end.

Of course, the material we publish here won’t be perfect. We think the risk of making any public errors or embarrassing omissions are outweighed the benefits of opening up this effort for more people to learn, share and help shape the collection of research and documentation we are building. For more on the issues and advantages of this approach, be sure to read historian W. Caleb McDaniel’s 2013 post on Open Notebook History.

We’ve already published a historiography first drafted in early June and a resource guide for teachers and families. In the next few weeks, we plan to share essays summarizing our research on the themes of housing and criminal injustice. Please learn more about the project, take a look around the new site, and get in touch with your questions or suggestions.