Walking Baltimore

Presents a collection of thirty-three self-guided walking tours of Baltimore highlighting cultural attractions, historical sites, museums, monuments, religious institutions, outdoor acitivies, shopping, and restaurants for each route.

Outsiders had called it "Mob Town" when, on April 19, 1861, Confederate sympathizers attacked Yankee soldiers and shed the first blood of the Civil War. According to Frank Shivers, Baltimore's unique charm must have something to do with the city's wonderful mix of opposites – North and South, old-fashioned rowhouses and modern office towers, industrial waterfront and revitalized inner harbor, the venerable Walters Art Gallery and funky Fells Point bars. In the 12 tours of Walking in Baltimore, Shivers invites readers and walkers to explore the city's rich past and lively present. Each tour highlights places where notable Baltimoreans made their mark – where BABE RUTH was born, where EDGAR ALLAN POE is buried, where FREDERICK DOUGLASS learned to read, where SCOTT AND ZELDA FITZGERALD had their last home together, where WALLIS WARFIELD married her first husband. Shivers tells where to go to indulge special interests such as sports, the arts, and maritime history. And he offers good advice about restaurants, shops, and transportation. With a wealth of new details that Shivers has uncovered about street names, outdoor sculpture, famous literary figures, and more. Walking in Baltimore offers an intimate look at the heart of a grand old city. Illustrated with more than 75 photographs, most taken especially for this book by Lisa Frances Davis, this guide promises memorable walking – and delightful reading – for native Baltimoreans and curious visitors alike.

It’s not necessary to travel far from home for a great hike. With these information-packed guides in hand, readers have everything they need for the adventure they seek, from an easy nature walk to a multiday backpacking trip. Each hike includes: location, length, hiking time, level of difficulty, and if dogs can come along. Other features include: Trail finder chart that categorizes each hike (e.g. for particular attractions such as scenic views and if it’s suitable for families with kids) Full-color photos throughout Information on the area’s history, geology, flora, and fauna Full-color maps of each trail

It’s Time to Take a Hike in Baltimore, Maryland! The best way to experience Baltimore is by hiking it! Get outdoors with authors Allison Sturm and Evan Balkan, with the new full-color edition of 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Baltimore. A perfect blend of popular trails and hidden gems, the selected trails transport you to scenic overlooks, wildlife hot spots, and historical settings that renew your spirit and recharge your body. You’ll learn about the area and experience nature through 60 of Charm City’s best hikes! Each hike description features key at-a-glance information on distance, difficulty, scenery, traffic, hiking time, and more, so you can quickly and easily learn about each trail. Detailed directions, GPS-based trail maps, and elevation profiles help to ensure that you know where you are and where you’re going. Tips on nearby activities further enhance your enjoyment of every outing. Whether you’re a local looking for new places to explore or a visitor to the area, 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Baltimore provides plenty of options for a couple hours or a full day of adventure, all within about an hour from Baltimore and the surrounding communities.

From field work conducted entirely in the year 2000, Baltimore Trails answers the needs of hikers and mountain bikers, offering accurate maps, up-to-date information, and reliable trail descriptions.

Whether hiking within the city or out in the rural Carroll and northwest counties, this guide provides hikers with expertly drawn trail maps and profiles. Included are hikes in the major state parks and reservoirs and six surrounding counties, covering beaches, forests, and the Chesapeake Bay.

With a writer’s keen eye, a longtime resident’s familiarity, and his own sly wit, acclaimed novelist Madison Smartt Bell leads us on a walk through his adopted hometown of Baltimore, a city where crab cakes, Edgar Allan Poe, hair extensions, and John Waters movies somehow coexist. From its founding before the Revolutionary War to its place in popular culture—thanks to seminal films like Barry Levinson’s Diner, the television show Homicide, and bestselling books by George Pelecanos and Laura Lippman—Baltimore is America, and in Charm City, Bell brings its story to vivid life. First revealing how Baltimore received some of its nicknames—including “Charm City”—Bell sets off from his neighborhood of Cedarcroft and finds his way across the city’s crossroads, joined periodically by a host of fellow Baltimoreans. Exploring Baltimore’s prominent role in history (it was here that Washington planned the battle of Yorktown and Francis Scott Key witnessed the “bombs bursting in air”), Bell takes us to such notable spots as the Inner Harbor and Federal Hill, as well as many of the undiscovered corners that give Baltimore its distinctive character. All the while, Charm City sheds deserved light onto a sometimes overlooked, occasionally eccentric, but always charming place.

The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of "modern-day" lynchings. On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."