Site #7: East Baltimore, 1978
Dates
- 1978
Conditions Governing Access
The collection is open for research use.
Historical Note
During the early twentieth century, East Baltimore became home to part of the city’s growing Polish population. This group was joined by immigrants from Germany, Italy, Lithuania, and African Americans migrating from the South. At the time of BNHP, several neighborhoods in this area were undergoing urban renewal.
The Hampden neighborhood is located in East Baltimore. Some planning districts locate Highlandtown in East Baltimore (HMA); others place it in Southeast Baltimore (BN). During the BNHP, members of the Highlandtown History Group conducted many of the interviews for those participating from this site.
Most of the interviews were conducted by the Highland History Group, which was an offshoot of the BNHP’s “Eating Together” site at the Abbot Memorial Church in the neighborhood. In the fall of 1978, Linda Shopes, oral history consultant for the BNHP, trained the members in oral history interviewing techniques so that they could participate in documenting their own community. According to the program files maintained by Shopes, the quality of the interviews suffered from this lack of professionalism. For example, she states that “questions posed to interviewees are frequently loaded...the structure of the interviews themselves is generally fragmented, jumping from topic to topic without sufficient probing.”
Some interviews were conducted at the Family and Children’s Center Saga Project on East Federal Street.
Sources:
“Baltimore Neighborhoods,” City of Baltimore, Maryland, Accessed on March 17, 2005,
http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/neighborhoods/index.html.
”History of Highlandtown,” Highlandtown Merchants Association, accessed on March 26, 2005, http://www.highlandtownmerchants.com/history.html.
Health and Wellness Council of the Baltimore Area, Historical Analysis of
Baltimore’s Inner City (Baltimore, 1964). (HN 80. B3 H47)
Extent
9 Items : 9 oral histories
Language of Materials
From the Collection: English
Scope and Contents
The Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project Oral History Collection contains paper records and audiocassette recordings from 1978 through 1980. The paper records are composed of the files kept on each narrator (the person being interviewed) and the administrative needs of the project. Narrator records contain biography forms, interview notes, and tape indexes for approximately 212 narrators. The interview notes briefly describe the circumstance surrounding the interview(s) session. The tape index includes the name of the narrator, the name of interviewer, the number of tapes, the tape(s) length, and the primary subjects covered. Seventy-nine of the records include transcripts. Transcript length ranges from 8 to 65 pages. Some are single-spaced; others are doubled-spaced. The interviews range from twenty-five minutes to three hours in length. One file, #183, and its accompanying cassette(s) were removed from the collection.
Thirty-two interviewers participated in the project. Typically, the interviews were one-on-one sessions between interviewer and narrator; however, single interviewer and double-narrator situations occurred, as did three group “nostalgia” sessions. Most interviews were prefaced by unrecorded, pre-interview sessions that occurred days before the recorded interview.
Each narrator abstract includes the following information when available: the BNHP interview number; the name of the interviewer; the date of the interview; the place of the interview; the length of the interview; the number of tapes used; the length of the transcript; and the file contents, such as subject index, interview notes, and biography form. The abstracts follow the numerical order of the interview number. However, interview numbers are not consecutive, but site specific. That is to say, any omitted number within a site can be found in another site.
When controversial or outdated terms, especially those referring to race and ethnicity, are mentioned in the abstract, the politically-correct term is used and the term or terms used by the narrator has been placed in parenthetical (“ ”) quotation marks. Specific terms from the interviews and textual uncertainties are often placed in parentheses alone ( ). Maiden names of female narrators are placed in brackets [ ].
Repository Details
Part of the H. Furlong Baldwin Library Repository
H. Furlong Baldwin Library
Maryland Center for History and Culture
610 Park Avenue
Baltimore MD 21201 United States
4106853750
specialcollections@mdhistory.org