Introductory Post

     Hi, I'm Josh. I'm a graduate student at UMBC working towards my masters in history. I'm in my second semester as a full time student in grad school. The majority of my research is focused on 19th and 20th century U.S. history. With an emphasis on social, cultural, urban, environmental, and architectural history. I'm interested in historic preservation and hope to find an internship for the summer that will allow me to explore this interest further. Having lived in and around the city of Baltimore all of my life, I hope to concentrate my graduate thesis on the city. I believe that Baltimore has a rich history and I hope to contribute towards its preservation. I'm currently taking a class with Dr. Nicole King called American Studies 622: Preserving Places, Making Spaces in Baltimore. One of the assignments for the course is to create a blog. Through this blog I will reflect on my experience throughout the semester.

    Our readings this week had several common themes: racial equity, protests, reckoning, spatial racism, community, and forced displacement. Racial equity has recently become a buzzword thrown around by politicians and business owners who rarely understand or embrace it. However as Lawrence T. Brown explains in The Black Butterfly racial equity is required to dismantle American apartheid. In the introduction Brown lays out the steps for implementing racial equity. It begins with acknowledging and reckoning with the injustices that minorities have endured throughout American history. I completely agree with this sentiment, while people may never be able to completely move past their generational trauma, they may be able to learn from it grow. 

    To better understand and eventually reckon with this trauma we must listen to peoples stories. We saw examples of this in Dr. King and Wesley Morris' work. Morris interviewed individuals affected by highway development in Philadelphia's Chinatown. These residents were adapting to life after their neighborhood was literally ripped in half. As part of our semester long project we will be listening to the residents of Baltimore's Poppleton. These interviews will allow us to create profiles on these individuals which will then be used for a larger collaborative project. This project could take the shape of a podcast like Morris' Still Processing, a zine, or even a story map.  

    As a side note one topic that I hope to explore further is Afrofuturistic ecological thinking. The phrase was mentioned in Brown's introduction. I've never heard of this before and hope to learn more about it throughout the book.