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historical process, human agency and choice has a role, it should be possible to
discern alternate historical paths that might have been taken but were not, without
being hopelessly speculative. Socially-dominant ideologies and ideologists
discourage such an approach, because their impulse is to depict the present as the
only possible outcome of the past. Those historians who are interested in a "usable"
past and who believe the study of history can have relevance to the future are more
friendly to such an effort. In this spirit, the more localized movements of the
formative 1930-1935 period will be explored for potentials that were not completely
fulfilled.5

This study, then, is a local study that hopes to say something of more than
local interest. It is not, however, a "case study" in the usual sense of the term. In
the introduction to her book on slavery and freedom in Maryland in the nineteenth
century, historian Barbara Jeanne Fields remarks that, in her work, the locale she
studies is not "posing as a representative of the others": the struggles and
experiences of the people she examines had their own integrity, their own profound
humanness; the stories of these struggles deserve, in their own right, to be told.
That point of view is shared here. Moreover, this is not a case study in the sense
that Baltimore is viewed somehow as a microcosm or (worse) a metaphor for the
U.S. as a whole.

Nevertheless, Baltimore in the 1930s was a constituent part of the U.S. social
formation within (to use Wallersteinian terminology) a developing world system/
Social forces that operated throughout that social formation and, indeed, the world
system, operated in various forms and in various combinations in Baltimore. This
study does hope to shed some further light on the nature of some of those social
forces. Furthermore, this study hopes to offer some comparative suggestions, and
some basis for comparison, for others doing similar local studies.

What and how a local study can contribute to more global historical
knowledge - beyond a donation to the data bank of facts - is highly problematical.