TY - JOUR TI - Reforming charm city DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T34Q7STH PY - 2012 AB - “Reforming Charm City: Grassroots Activism and the Making of Modern Baltimore, 1877-1920” uses Baltimore as a case study to explore the ways that race, class, and gender shaped the urban experience in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. This dissertation examines the Progressive Era from the bottom up. Far from being quiescent subjects of reform, working people built the foundations for equality between 1877 and 1920. Their efforts complicate our understandings of an era too often depicted solely as the triumph of middle-class and elite conceptions of order. Using court records, memoirs, vice reports, newspapers, and government documents this project examines the multiple ways in which Baltimore’s disenfranchised residents challenged entrenched powers, altered political debates, helped establish policies on vice, and reshaped the city’s residential landscape. In so doing, it uncovers a largely neglected history of African-American reformers who laid the foundation for the twentieth century civil rights movement and defeated the nation’s first housing segregation ordinance. Similarly, it documents how workers and other non-elites mounted campaigns to end political corruption and economic exploitation, and how women from all of these groups addressed a range of urban woes. KW - History LA - eng ER -