Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community. He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.

Over the course of several centuries, Baltimore evolved from a Colonial-era port city to a thriving and dynamic city of nearly a million people at the conclusion of World War II As the city grew, a wide variety of industries were established. Railroads, ports, manufacturing sites, and public infrastructure, such as power plants, fundamentally transformed large swaths of Baltimore's landscape. However, the second half of the 20th century saw a dramatic and often traumatic restructuring of the city's economy; individual businesses and entire industrial sectors downsized, relocated, or completely collapsed. Today many such areas of Baltimore have changed radically as abandoned manufacturing sites have been demolished or converted to new uses. Images of America: Industrial Baltimore documents a vital component of the city's working past through historic photographs of the people and sites that made the city an essential economic engine of the Industrial Revolution.

This collection contains 17 papers presented at the Fifth National History and Heritage Congress at the 2004 ASCE Annual Conference and Exposition, held in Baltimore, Maryland, October 20-23, 2004.

Incorporated in 1827, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was one of America's first railroads, and Maryland was its heart and soul. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's (B&O) creation was a tangible symbol of the Industrial Revolution, representing commerce and progress to towns along its route. Its headquarters and operations, centered in Baltimore, provided years of economic growth for the port city. This book contains images of well-known stations in Maryland, including Ellicott City Station, Gaithersburg Station, Camden Station, and the Mount Clare Shops--a self-contained industrial city, now home to the B&O Railroad Museum. Some stations still exist and are home to small museums or restaurants; others no longer stand, but images of them will remind even the casual historian of a time when railroads were a part of everyday life in America. Take a step back in time and revisit the sites, stations, and trains of the B&O that were once part of everyday life in Maryland and remember the glory of a bygone era.