Events

Past Events

View recordings of past lectures, seminars, tours and workshops, as well as helpful training videos on how to use various records in our collections in our free online Presentation Library.

July Virtual Lunch and Learn - Unearthing, Preserving, and Promoting LGBTQ+ History in Maryland

An 1870s lesbian gunslinger. Extravagant 1930s drag balls. Mass protests of the 1980s and 1990s. All are a part of our story.

In 2018, Preservation Maryland engaged in a project to create the first comprehensive study of LGBTQ+ history and historic preservation across Maryland. In conducting the research for this project, Ben Egerman was able to identify a wide array of places associated with LGBTQ+ history and create a number of resources to help those interested in the subject learn more about our communities’ rich and vibrant history in the state.

Since then, he has presented with another librarian and community elders on the subject of local LGBTQ+ history to audiences across the state, as well as working with students, artists, and academics to promote and build awareness of Maryland’s LGBTQ+ past.

This talk will discuss these projects, what they tell us about Maryland’s history, and some of the difficulties in doing research in this area–all punctuated by amazing and eye-opening stories of LGBTQ+ people and life in the state stretching back nearly 200 years.

Ben Egerman (he/him) is a public librarian and researcher living in Baltimore. His work with Preservation Maryland on the Maryland LGBTQ Historic Context Study yielded a preliminary list of over 300 extant sites related to LGBTQ+ history in the state, and has been recognized by the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History , who awarded the project the Allan Berube Prize for community history in early 2024. He has worked with a fellow librarian and two community elders to bring various stories from Maryland’s LGBTQ+ past to audiences in libraries across the state. He aims for his work to lie at the intersection of community building, advocacy, and public history.

August Virtual Lunch and Learn - Race and the Road: Fighting the “Highway to Nowhere” and Neighborhood Destruction in Baltimore

Drawing from his book, Stop the Road, Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars, Evans Paull gives an up close and personal account of Baltimore’s 40-year battle over expressway plans. Paull reveals astonishing stories of how a ragtag band of neighborhood activists, preservationists, and environmentalists managed to protect Baltimore’s historic waterfront communities of Federal Hill, Fell’s Point, and Canton. But this talk also provides a unique window into the city’s callous and unfair treatment its African American populations. The most famous example is the “Highway to Nowhere,” but Paull also delves into the equally revealing cases of the highways that shattered Sharp-Leadenhall and Rosemont. This is Baltimore and its history with race, all revealed in unflinching detail.

Northwest Baltimore resident E. Evans Paull is the author of Stop the Road, Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars (2022). His career spanned 45 years working as a city planner, first in Baltimore and then nationally on urban redevelopment issues. Paull’s consulting business, Redevelopment Economics, specialized in the challenging renewal issues that come under the umbrella of “brownfields” (contaminated/impaired land).

Paull has won several awards, including: Brownfields Leadership Award, Phoenix Award (for brownfields redevelopment), Governor’s Smart Growth Award and Professional Achievement in Economic Development Award from the Maryland Chapter American Planning Association. Paull has authored articles that have appeared in twelve professional journals

Paull is now retired and enjoying life with his wife, three children, and one grandchild.